[Fasterfox] Prefetching Question

[Tony Gentilcore]

Hi Kimberly,

 

Thanks for the email.  Without knowing more about how your system actually
counts a file as downloaded, I can't really comment as to if Fasterfox is
actually causing these to be downloaded or if people are just trying to get
out of paying for them.

 

You might be able to forward this response to the engineering team and let
them know to contact me if they have questions.

 

1.  Fasterfox only prefetches the following extensions:

.gif, .htm, .html, .jpeg, .jpg, .pdf, .png, .text, .txt, and .xml

MP3 files and extensions that are supposed to have dynamic content are never
prefetched for any site.

 

2.  Fasterfox version 1.0.1 and later, now allows sites to block prefetching
by adding the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Fasterfox
Disallow: /

Note that "User-agent: *" is ignored.

 

3.  Fasterfox version 1.0.0 also has a "whitelist" of sites that the user
can edit to skip prefetching.

 

4.       The following header is sent along with all prefetching requests:

X-moz: prefetch

Requests with this header can easily be blocked with a simple script in
Apache and most web servers.

 

The best suggestions I could offer would be to:

1.	Make sure that dynamic content doesn't end with the extensions
mentioned above which are intended for static content
2.	Add the lines mentioned above to your robots.txt
3.	Inform users to add "emusic.com" to their whitelist.
4.	Block all prefetching requests with the X-moz: prefetch header.

 

I hope this helps, and please don't hesitate to let me know if you still
have questions.

 

Regards,

Tony Gentilcore

 

  _____  

From: fasterfox-bounces at mozdev.org [mailto:fasterfox-bounces at mozdev.org] On
Behalf Of Kimberly Eis
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2005 1:40 PM
To: fasterfox at mozdev.org
Subject: [Fasterfox] Prefetching Question

 

eMusic.com is a subscription music download service.  We are getting reports
from customers (using fasterfox) that tracks are being downloaded
automatically when they load a page on our site.  This causes problems
because these downloads are deducted from their monthly total.  

 

Our engineering team believes fasterfox may not be honoring our robots.txt
file properly.

 

Please let me know what steps we should take to resolve this issue.

 

Thank you,

 

Kimberly Eis

 

..........................................................

kimberly eis / quality assurance lead

 <mailto:keis at emusic.com> keis at emusic.com

 

eMusic / #1 site for independent music

 <http://www.emusic.com/browse/new.html>
http://www.emusic.com/browse/new.html

 

100 park ave / 17th fl / new york / ny / 10017

..........................................................

 

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