Planet Midgard: Archive

I use firefox, and have installed some of the addons. Mostly I just try them, and some of them just stick around (ForecastFox and of course the essential web developer toolbar). For some reason I now also tried the Fasterfox, without actually thinking what it does. It works great when one is just surfing around, but let's stop for a moment and think what it actually does...

The whole idea is to prefetch links. Well what if we have som ajax stuff there, and forms etc. It of course tries to prefetch them also. When this is done, they trigger functions, and this ends up to (at least) these nice situations like:

• forms are actually sent several times, as they are preloaded into memory
• different versions of the forms are sent
• article control in Midcom
• approve / unapprove => when sent several times, it messes up the system
• try reloading the page and see what happens, it's like russian roulette
  
• hide / unhide
• te same as with approvals

One could probably imagine several other nice situations where information and links are clicked and visited automatically...

Conclusion

Don't use fasterfox or other "network tweaking" thingies or you'll just end up in a big mess...

Update later the same day...

Things are now as fixed as they can be:

• http://midcom.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=349
• http://openpsa.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=48

Let's hope that these hotfixes help and that the prefetching start to use standardized ways. The idea of prefetching itself, although it makes things difficult, is not evil in the end...if we are prepared and ready that is.