288512 - User does not know whether a link is cached or has been prefetched

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Ashvin Goel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050323 Firefox/1.0.2 Fedora/1.0.2-1.3.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050323 Firefox/1.0.2 Fedora/1.0.2-1.3.1

Currently, it seems that a user cannot easily find out whether a document
referenced by a link is in the browser cache. For example, after a user visits a
page and a link in the page gets prefetched, then it might be useful to indicate
that the link has been prefetched by changing the color of the link. This way
the user would know that the page referred to by the link is cached. In other
words, the color change would allow distinguishing between cached and uncached
links. A user would be able to adapt their browsing behavior based on this
information.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[OstGote!]

see also Bug 288486

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

that's all well and good when you're using default link colors etc.  But how
does that work with sites that specify link colors via CSS?  Do we randomly pick
a color to fit with the background and not be the same as the other links?  This
is something that would probably cause more confusion than benefit for most users.

Comment 3

[Ashvin Goel]

I don't see the problem. Currently, the "font and color" preferences allows one
to specify the color of unvisited and visited links. I expect that there would
be a third preference for a cached link. Then this color would be used whenever
the unvisited and visited colors are used (and not otherwise).

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.