341203 - prefetching of URLs which should not be prefetched

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox Graveyard :: RSS Discovery and Preview, defect)

Description

[John Keegan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060608 Firefox/1.5.0.4 Flock/0.7.0.16.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060608 Firefox/1.5.0.4 Flock/0.7.0.16.2

According to the docs here:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/Link_Prefetching_FAQ.html

when prefetching LINKs:

* only <link> tags with a relation type of next or prefetch are prefetched
* we explicitly do not prefetch URLs with query strings.

However, it appears that on pages on our network such as the URL above which contain the following:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Authenticated RSS: Life Beyond Code" href="http://blog.lifebeyondcode.com/blog/index.xml?secure=1">

the URL is prefetched according to our tests... Which it should not be, since the relation os neither next or prefetch and the URL contains a query string.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open URL such as above or http://accordionguy.blogware.com/ as another example
2. Moz prefetches secure url which contains a query string
3. Auth dialog appears

Actual Results:  
User can click cancel on auth dialog, but site becomes unusable since auth dialog will appear on every page...

Expected Results:  
It should not have prefetched a URL such as contained in this bit of html 

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Authenticated RSS: Life Beyond Code" href="http://blog.lifebeyondcode.com/blog/index.xml?secure=1">

thus not displaying an auth dialog

Comment 1

[Uriah Narmed]

I can't reproduce this in Firefox 1.5.0.4. Are you sure this isn't a Flock issue?

Comment 2

[John Keegan]

I personally can reproduce this in my "virgin" just-downloaded copy of Mac Flock, but not in my "used" Firefox... I do have users who have reported this behavior under Windows Firefox 1.5.0.4, though I personally am just now seeing it in Flock.

Thanks!

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

It would certainly be a Flock issue, since they apparently only show autodiscovery UI for feeds that they've already verified they can parse, which means they have to fetch them - you'll find their Bugzilla at http://bugzilla.flock.com.

For Firefox? I can't reproduce in 1.5.0.4, or Bon Echo, or trunk, in Windows or Mac or Linux, and I can't think of any code in the tree which would prefetch discovered feeds. If any of the people who are reporting it to you as being in Firefox can give steps to reproduce which don't involve installing an extension, feel free to reopen.

Comment 4

[John Keegan]

I've discovered that:

1) Flock will prefetch RSS exactly as you described, which will cause this symptom due to their inability to handle http basic auth. Flock devs acknowlege the issue here:

 http://bugzilla.flock.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4235

2) Google Toolbar also causes this same issue when installed on Firefox. Google acknowleges the issue here.

 http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-6121

Thanks for your help, and I hope you find this information useful. And good luck with the project!