Aral Balkan: Historical Archive — Google Web Accelerator reveals flaws in traditional web applications

Google Web Accelerator reveals flaws in traditional web applications

I just read an interesting alert for Web Designers by Khoi Vinh. Apparently, Google Web Accelerator is causing havoc on some HTML-based web applications with its prefetch behavior. By trying to prefetch all content linked from a page, it effectively ends up "clicking" on each link. On a normal web site, this would probably be safe enough. But what about a traditional (HTML-based) web application?

Imagine you're checking your web mail using an HTML-based webmail application. You log in. Google starts prefetching links, starting with the "Delete All" link! You get the picture.

Not surprisingly, SWF-based web applications (Rich Internet Applications or RIAs built using Flash, Flex, etc.) are not affected by this.

Comments

Hi Aral, Ah! you are right. But Google Web Accelerator does not speed up pages encrypted by HTTPS and most of the mail services encrypted with HTTPS. Anyway your message could be a valid one for google, they may consider this and may change Google Web Accelerator work flow. As a developer we all should consider your point while developing HTML based web application. Great! Thanks KBala
by KBala on 2009-05-21 14:35:17