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Google Accelerator: Be Careful Where You Browse

Posted by timothy on from the press-three-for-random-deletions dept.

Eagle5596 writes "It seems that there can be a serious problem with Google's Web Accelerator, and I'm not talking about the privacy concerns. Evidently some people have been finding that due to the prefetching of pages their accounts and data are being deleted."

6 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Another POV... by Gothic_Walrus · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Something Awful had an article on this subject a few days ago.

    I'm not sure if I agree with the "Google is the new Microsoft" sentiments, but thinking before you install new software is always a good idea.

    --
    Goo goo g'joob.
    1. Re:Another POV... by Jerf · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Actually, that's yet another different problem, one where you get the wrong page from the cache, specifically somebody else's personalized page. It is completely unrelated, in the sense that one could fix either problem independently. (It is possible that they have the same root cause, but I doubt it.)

      This bring the current list of reasons not to use the Accelerator up to three, counting the obvious privacy issues.

  2. Re:Stupid web developers by zenyu · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The root of the problem is stupid web developers ignoring RFC 2616 and using the GET method to change state.

    Seriously, using POSTs was something we all learned in 1994... Hopefully, this Google accelerator thingy will be popular enough to rid us of these creaky old broken sites.

  3. Re:Stupid web developers by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A lot of "stupid" web developers use GET so that those states can be bookmarked or sent to others so they can do something with it.

    Unless you have another idea, using GET for states is here to stay.

  4. Re:What the cunting fuck. by mkavanagh2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It is still Google's fault. Any half-competent software engineer would have thought about this, and the people at Google did not. It doesn't matter if the websites affected were non compliant to the RFC, because they were the existing state of affairs. Google stuck this crap out there with no thought for the existing state of affairs, so it is their fault. It's the practical view of things, and the practical view is the only one that anyone should take.

  5. Somebody isn't following the standards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Link pre-fetching, as performed by Mozilla/Firefox, is an opt-in thing. Webmasters should add the "rel='prefetch'" attribute to their tags to enable software to intelligently prefetch links.

    It's safe, it's an emerging standard, and webmasters maintain control. Why isn't Google following the standard?