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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."

7 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Just goes to show.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Google should have beta tested it first.

  2. Bug in the pages, not Google by keesh · · Score: 5, Informative

    According to the HTTP spec, GET requests must not be used to change content. POST actions must be used if you're deleting / changing something. And google doesn't prefetch POST, does it?

    1. Re:Bug in the pages, not Google by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you want to POST something, the only way to do that is to use a form. Forms cause a few problems.

      With all due respect, even though forms aren't perfect, they've been around over a decade, and if you can't deal with them by now, don't bother calling yourself a web developer.

      Wherever a form ends, the browser inserts vertical space in many situations, some of which are unavoidable.

      You're kidding, right? If you don't want a bottom margin, say so with CSS. This is basic FAQ newbie stuff.

      If you want a regular text link to submit a form, you have to use Javascript.

      You can use CSS to make the button look like a text link.

      This creates a dependancy on Javascript

      No it doesn't. You can easily use Javascript without depending on it. That's the way it's supposed to be used. This too is basic newbie stuff.

      Other issues with form POSTing include the inability to use the back button after POSTing.

      Huh? Works fine here.

      there's no way for webmasters to tell the browser not to pop up with the "Are you sure you want to resend the POST action again?" window.

      That's not a bug, that's a feature! POST is not idempotent. Resubmitting a POST is something that absolutely needs to be warned about, because it's a fundamentally different action to reloading a page with GET.

      GET followed by refresh == just GET it again

      POST followed by refresh == send the server some more data

      So, if we choose to follow the HTTP guidelines, we break UI and style guidelines even worse.

      There is a reason submit buttons look different to links. It's because they do different things. There are semantics associated with clicking a button that aren't associated with clicking a link. If style guidelines instruct you to make submit buttons look like links, then the style guidelines are probably broken.

      So, if we choose to follow the HTTP guidelines, we break UI and style guidelines even worse. If we want to use POST we have to give up having the page rendering correctly in major browsers, break the back button, break the ability to bookmark state information (unless you encode variables both in the URL in get fashion AND others in a POST), and make every link either an image(bad for accessability and download speeds) or use some Javascript magic (even worse for bookmarkability and accessability).

      Wow. Get with the times. No really. I'd expect this kind of attitude from a newbie developer in the mid 90s.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Re:What the cunting fuck. by mkavanagh2 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Oh, and obligatory "lol slashdot" comment: Think about what most people would be saying if Internet Explorer suddenly did this because Microsoft thought it would be a good idea. You'd be all over them like rats over a rotting horse cock.

  6. 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.