Re: [Usability]Mozilla & Link Prefetching UI Sanity

[darin netscape com (Darin Fisher)]

Yeah, a number of folks have commented about the volume-billed
connection issue.  Basically, there are two ways of looking at this
issue.

1- websites can already cause things to be silently downloaded, so what
good does disabling this particular "silent download" mechanism buy you?

2- prefetching is a browser feature; users should be able to disable it
easily.

I think it is important that websites adopt <link> tag based
prefetching instead of trying to roll in silent downloading using
various DOM/JS hacks.  The <link> tag gives the useragent the
ability to know what sites are up to, and we can use this information
to better prioritize the prefetching.  I suppose my half-concern is
that a preference would encourage websites to stick with DOM/JS hacks.

Ultimately, I think we will probably end up with a visible user
preference just because that seems to make people feel comfortable.
 But, in the end it only partially solves the problem people think it
solves :-/

I suppose it matters to what extent <link> prefetching takes off.

Darin



Steve Fox wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-10-17 at 08:31, Colin Marquardt wrote:
> > One point though: even if the implementation is all fine and dandy,
> > I might still be browsing with a volume-billed connection where I
> > might not want that.
> >   
>
> Not to mention that it seems to be up to the page author to say which
> links to pre-load. I'd rather not give page views to sites that I don't
> support. Please correct me if misunderstand how this works.