It’s been around four months since they released the browser for Windows, but still no word (that I’ve heard, anyway) on release dates. Around the time of the Windows version release, I eagerly signed up to their mailing list so I can keep up to date with Mac version development – but still nothing

Whilst it’s a huge step forward (in the right direction, I’d like to add), there’s still no alternative (and I doubt there will be for a long time to come) to textual content being marked up with the correct HTML semantics if you wish for your Flash-based content to be a) accessible, b) on an equal footing with its semantic HTML file counterparts for ranking results (based purely on internal factors in this particular context), c) quick to download… the list goes on. Add to that the ability to aggregate physical files (HTML, video formats) into an XML sitemap, rather than relying purely on Google to identify your new pages through crawling links, and you have still no excuse for not correctly marking up your textual content semantically.

So whilst I welcome this news that textual content and hyperlinks within Flash files are that bit more accessible, I’ll still get a shiver down my spine every time I see any form of text embedded in a Flash file.

This is the Adobe press release on the matter which goes into more detail, and here’s one from Google

If you have Google Web Accelerator installed on your machine, it’s best for you to not to use any web apps that incorporate destructive links, as you might find out one day that you’ve removed page content, left groups you intentionally joined, deleted users on your site etc – the list could go on.

Background

Straight from the horses mouth:-

“Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google’s global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.”

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

• Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
• Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
• Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
• Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
• Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
• Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

Essentially, it prefetches pages to cache by spidering links that present on the page your viewing at a given time. So this begs the question – what links are, and aren’t prefetchable? Well, Googles Support pages on the matter state that in line with the HTTP 1.1 spec, “‘the GET method is defined as a Safe Method which “SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval.’ In practice, Google Web Accelerator does not prefetch links which have query parameters (i.e. have a “?” in the URL) and encrypted pages (i.e. URL starting with https://).”

In v1.0 we could directly target it as it identified its requests with a “X-moz: prefetch” header, however apparently in v2.0, the header has dissapeared. Having said that, it’s slightly strange that Google haven’t updated their pages to reflect the apparent changes in v2.0

Although I have no first-hand experience of this, it was highlighted to me (cheers Mark) when I was implementing the UI for a past project.

I’ll let you read through a number of useful comments on the subject submitted by readers… I’m off to bed.