What is firefox prefetching?
What is firefox prefetching?
Posted Jun 16, 2005 1:13 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)Parent article: What is firefox prefetching?
I really really wish they had an "advanced features" tab in the preferences for Firefox, under which every behavior that was tweakable via prefs.js could be set. I dislike hidden features.
Posted Jun 16, 2005 6:28 UTC (Thu)
by beejaybee (guest, #1581)
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In this case on/off control is too coarse, I guess the best idea may be to whitelist sites which are allowed to push unrequested content, even if only as far as the browser cache.
Posted Jun 17, 2005 2:26 UTC (Fri)
by xoddam (subscriber, #2322)
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Posted Jun 20, 2005 12:18 UTC (Mon)
by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
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That's assuming the prefetch has to be perfect. Even fetching the redirect page will cut out one round-trip time (that's 0.2s for international users of US websites, sounds small but remember from User Interfaces 101 that a response time >0.3s is perceived as "slow"). With that in mind, prefetch using the current set of cookies and stop when it requires a cookie to be written. If the user selects the prefetched page then write that cookie and continue. That means that some pages are "prefetch unfriendly", but that's the case anyway (the discussion about multiple sets of cookies is really about how to work around that unfriendliness).
Posted Jun 16, 2005 7:39 UTC (Thu)
by andersg (guest, #25522)
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I really with prefetching could be limited to only prefetch on the same site.
Posted Jun 16, 2005 8:44 UTC (Thu)
by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
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The "about:config" interface is only a little bit more user friendly that editing the binary with vi - at least for those of us who have no idea what "ui.key.saveLink.shift" means.
Posted Jun 16, 2005 15:58 UTC (Thu)
by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029)
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Me too. And when there are privacy / security implications (which there clearly are in this case) the default mode should be "safe" i.e. prefetch off.What is firefox prefetching?
> even if only as far as the browser cache. What is firefox prefetching?
That *sounds* like a neat situation -- record the http session and don't
"replay" it into the browser proper (setting cookies, etc.) until the
user has explicitly requested the page.
Unfortunately many websites don't just give you a page when you first
make your http request, but rather set some cookies in a 'redirect' or
'continue' response, and can give you all sorts of silly responses if you
don't reply with the cookie.
So at best, to prefetch a whole page without accepting cookies into the
cache, you'd have to do it in a sandbox which can handle its own cookies.
If you want to support scripts too (necessary for fetching images in many
cases) it becomes ludicrously complex.
I'd rather not prefetch at all.
No need for prefetch to be perfect
There is? It's called about:configWhat is firefox prefetching?
It's called about:config
What is firefox prefetching?
Not to mention options like accessibility.tabfocus, which is an integer that I currently have set to the highly obvious value of 7.What is firefox prefetching?