Google Web Accelerator

From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia, by MultiMedia

Google Web Accelerator is a web accelerator produced by Google. It uses data compression and prefetching of content which may be cached on Google's servers to speed up page load times. The beta, released on May 4, 2005 works with both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows machines.

Technical Issues

While the Web Accelerator works well on public websites, it can be damaging to Administrative Web applications. By prefetching the accelerator also activates "delete" or "cancel" links. It also ignores JavaScript confirmations and performs the action without user confirmation. This is an issue for web applications that use regular href attributes that reference URLs that have side effects when using HTTP GET. Instead, web applications should use form buttons which use the HTTP POST command for links that cause side effects.

Privacy Issues

There was controversy over the Google Accelerator as some users found that their personal website cookies were being shared to other users. This meant that some users found pages such as forum control panels of other users containing personal information appearing and that is was possible to spoof post as those other users. Secure websites were unaffected as the Google Accelerator did not scan sites protected by https.

It is thought that this was the reason the Google Accelerator was taken down; however, Google cited on the Google Accelerator website that it was taken down because their servers had reached their maximum capacity.

See Also

• List of Google services and tools#Web Accelerator

• Google (search engine)

• Web accelerator

References

• Google Web Accelerator: Hey, not so fast - an alert for web app designers - 37signals article on how to prevent precaching accelerators like Google's causing damage to administrative websites
• The Register article on suspension of the Google Accelerator

External Links

• Google Web Accelerator Official site
  • Official FAQ
• File Hippo Mirror Download

Articles

• GamesAreFun.com News - ALERT: Do NOT Use Google Web Accelerator!

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This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.