The Google Web Accelerator is back with a vengeance David 150 comments Latest by Richard W. Cox

Google has reintroduced their Google Web Accelerator with a vengeance. It was evil enough the first time around, but this time it’s downright scary.

In version 1.0, web masters at least had a fighting chance as the GWA identified its requests with a “X-moz: prefetch” header (as prescribed by Mozilla). Sure, everyone in the world had to change their web applications to fit Google’s vision of a perfect world, but at least they could.

Not so for version 2.0 of this virus. It ships with a brand new mutation: The header is gone! There’s now no way to identify a pre-fetch from a regular request, which means that it’s no longer possible to block the GWA.

While one should always be cautious to ascribe to malice that which could be explained by ignorance, this appears like double up on evil with a smirk of dark lord. I can not fathom that Google would not merely repeat the mistake from round 1, but actually tweak the offering to increase the chances and scope of hurt?!

Someone, somewhere, please tell me this is not so. That we accidently got a bastard, mutant version of the GWA. That it’s not actually software that Google is allowing unknowing souls everywhere to download and rampage with.

This is bad.

UPDATE: Profanity is a tool reserved for special occasions. This is one such: WHAT THE FUCK!?! Two minutes after I posted this, Google pulled the same stunt they did last time around:

Thank you for your interest in Google Web Accelerator. We have currently reached our maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users we can support.

First, it’s great they’re paying faster attention to the backlash. But second, how could this happen again and worse than before? How little memory do they equip the release managers with? This is shocking.

UPDATE 2: The missing header is a bug, not evil.