Today I read an article in the Inquirer at ( http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23051 ) titled ‘How to block Google’s web accelerator’. It seems that Google has just issued a beta version of a ‘web accelerator’ that causes all normal http web requests to go through a Google server. Google’s server saves the web page, the time you accessed it, the connection you used, etc. It does not handle https web pages, the secured protocol pages used for credit cards. This can eventually lead to faster web surfing on your part, at least if you use the high-bandwidth connection that it is optimized for.

In addition, it installs a web page cache on your hard drive, separate from the browser web cache, and stores some web pages there, so you do not even need to request them over the internet. And it prefetches web pages it thinks you might link to next, storing them on your hard disk in the accelerator cache.

Of course, this is beta software, and some people have already received other people’s web pages. This is really a nightmare for corporate security, since people in their company, accessing the corporate site, are storing web views outside the corporate net on Google’s servers if they have Google web accelerator on their computer. So some corporations are hastily blocking connections from the Google server IP addresses.

I read the Google description of their web accelerator at http://webaccelerator.google.com/support and decided that I would treat this particular program like I would a case of bubonic plague.

But the Google prefetch operation led me to http://www.tweakguides.com/Firefox_1.html which is a very good description of tweaks for Firefox, where I learned to my horror that the standard Google query prefetches web pages by default for Firefox. If I make a Google inquiry with Firefox, then Google can prefetch the web page that it thinks I am most likely to choose from the list of results sent from that inquiry and store it in my browser cache area on my hard disk. The last page of the tweak guide told me that the innocuous-sounding network.prefetch-next variable in about:config which is set to true by default allows Google to do this. I typed in ‘about:config’ in my Firefox browser address and double-clicked on network.prefetch-next to turn it to false. This is the only advanced tweak I have ever applied to Firefox, but I am very cautious about prefetches. I have always warned friends that Outlook Express should never be allowed to preview email, because that can activate viruses in emails that they do not open.

mycrofth