Prefetching considered harmless

Posted Jun 23, 2005 6:04 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627)
Parent article: What is firefox prefetching?

A malicious site can already secretly load other sites on your behalf. It's as simple as creating a hidden IFRAME; <link rel="prefetch"> provides no new abilities here. So the use of prefetching by malicious sites is not interesting, and there is no point in Firefox trying to protect you from them.

The only issue is whether friendly sites are using it correctly. So the question is, is Google doing the right thing with its prefetch directives? Their FAQ indicates that they only issue a prefetch when their analysis shows that the vast majority of users go straight to that search result. Whatever bad thing happens when you load that site already happens to 99% of the users with that search term. Furthermore since Google already has some sort of porn detection, that can be applied as a filter too.

Anyway, whether or not Google is doing the right thing, it is not a Firefox issue. Apart from the fact that malicious sites can already get the same effects using hidden IFRAMEs, Firefox has had prefetching for *years* and no real problems have been detected.