Google Web Accelerator

The recent release of Google’s Web Accelerator has caused a bit of a ruckus in the web development community.

The main feature of GWA is it’s ability to follow all <a> links on a page and pre-fetch the resources into browser cache, making the resource appear almost instantly when you click the <a> link.

Sounds great for the public, but web developers started thinking about all those web apps that include GET values in <a> links to perform various important functions (e.g. such as adding or deleting records from a database). What’s more, GWA ignores any javascript confirm alerts, so you can forget about them saving you. 37 Signals voiced their own concerns after discovering GWA would wreak havoc with their newly launched Backpack web-app.

So has Google messed up? Well, despite incurring the wrath of many web developers, it looks like they’ve got a decent defence — claiming that web developers should pay closer attention to standards. The standards in question are those laid down by the W3C describing appropriate use of GET and POST :

Use GET if:

  • The interaction is more like a question (i.e., it is a safe operation such as a query, read operation, or lookup).

Use POST if:

  • The interaction is more like an order, or
  • The interaction changes the state of the resource in a way that the user would perceive (e.g., a subscription to a service), or
  • The user be held accountable for the results of the interaction.

I’ve got web apps out there that will foul prey to GWA’s pre-fetching, but I have to admit that Google have a point. Although strictly speaking they are in the right, I think they should have paid more attention to how web-apps behave in the real world. Whatever your opinion, we should thank Google for reminding us when to use GET and when to use POST.

Posted 4 years, 10 months ago

Well well well.. this is very concerning. While I understand Google’s point of view (as I am a webdevelopper myself)... the standards DO NOT rule on the internet. Chaos.. does. Sloppiness does.
So the big mistake Google did was hoping everyhting was nice and fluffy (or simply they did not see what’s comming).

So... I ask Google if in those conditions... will the end users use their application when they see that weird stuff happen since they installed GWA? Or does Google hope that all webdeveloppment teams or individuals will suddenly jumps the bridge into the strict waters of correctness??? Following rules is somethimes a hard and neverending road...

Puiu · 4 years, 10 months ago

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My name is Phil Lindsay, a web guy from Scotland, now living in Newcastle upon Tyne in England. I also run a web design company called Presence. You can email me at phil@xlab.co.uk, read more ramblings on my Twitter stream and view my photos on Flickr. You can grab the RSS feed for this weblog here.