Google enhances search for Firefox users
Ingrid Marson
ZDNet
UK
March 31, 2005, 17:40 BST
A link prefetching feature supported by Mozilla
browsers will speed up Google searches, but there
are concerns that users will often be sent content
they don't want
Google has added a new feature to its search engine
that allows Firefox users to obtain search results
more quickly.
Reza Behforooz, a software engineer at Google,
announced on Wednesday that the search engine now
pre-loads the top search result into the cache of
Mozilla browsers.
"Now Google's faster than ever on Firefox
and Mozilla browsers," said Behforooz in a
posting on the company's blog. "When you do
a search on these browsers, we instruct them to
download your top search result in advance, so if
you click on it, you'll get to that page even more
quickly."
The search engine has used a link prefetching feature
that is supported by Mozilla browsers, including
Firefox. As Internet Explorer and other browsers
do not provide prefetching functionality, they will
not be able to use this feature.
But there are some potential issues. Google points
out in a FAQ that "you may end up with cookies
and Web pages in your Web browser's cache from Web
sites that you did not click on".
A few Firefox users have expressed concern about
this feature on the Mozillazine site. They say users
risk unknowingly downloading illegal content, and
could also end up using more bandwidth when surfing.
"You'll run into trouble if the first match
is a porno site and your company's proxy logs it
— you get all cookies of the first match without
seeing the page," said one user.
Another user, Alex Bishop, said that even if you
unknowingly download illegal content using the prefetch
feature, the content is flagged in a different way
to content that you have chosen to download.
"When documents are prefetched an 'x-moz:
prefetch' header is sent with the request and the
referrer header will match the Google search results
page," said Bishop. "So that might convince
them [that you didn't click on the prefetched link]."
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