Google Web Accelerator Considered Harmful

Google’s newest product is the “Google Web Accelerator”:http://webaccelerator.google.com, which says to make browsing the internet faster. That’s great, isn’t it? Absolutely. Unless you know how they implemented it and the absolutely catastrophic consequences of this.

Ok, so, how does the Google Web Accelerator make browsing faster? It’s quite simple actually, it prefetches pages. If you’re on a web page it will look for links on that page and load them in the background already, so that if you click them they’ll appear instantly. It’s simple, and probably also effective. There’s one tiny problem, however, as “the guys at 37signals.com found out”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/google_web_accelerator_hey_not_so_fast_an_alert_for_web_app_designers.php:

So, if you end up with an empty database after visiting phpMyAdmin, or all your weblog posts are gone, you know where to look.

To summarize:

DO NOT INSTALL GOOGLE WEB ACCELERATOR!

There.