Mozilla 1.2b: Link Prefetching and Type Ahead Find

As I had hoped, Mozilla 1.2 Beta was released yesterday. In addition to cleaning up a nifty feature I've been using for awhile at work (I keep the latest stable build on my home machine), type-ahead find, and now allowing the selection of images (like Internet Explorer), it adds a new feature with the goal of making an already fast browser insanely fast: link prefetching.

Upon first reading about this feature, I figured I'd implement link prefetching on this site for all comment boxes. I quickly realized that this would be impossible, however, because the URLs for my comment boxes use query strings, and that's not allowed in link prefetching.

Instead of not parsing the next relation, as Simon Willison proposes, I think a good compromise would be to prioritize prefetch relations over next relations and allow query strings in only prefetch relations. Because this relation is brand-new, and isn't currently used for accessibility reasons, a conscious effort would be necessary by adopters to prevent the query-string double bandwidth problem.

October 17, 2002 - 08:50 AM