A new Google feature lets Firefox browser users get their search results quicker, but there may be a drawback: cookies and Web pages in their browser cache that they never clicked.
Some Firefox users complained about the feature at a Mozilla e-zine website, saying people might be risking downloading illegal content without knowing it as well as possibly using more bandwidth than they expected while on the Internet.
"You'll run into trouble if the first match is a porno site and your company's proxy logs it—you get all cookies of the first match without seeing the page," one Firefox user wrote on the e-zine discussion board. Another said that even if people unknowingly download questionable content through the link feature, that content gets flagged differently than what they actually choose to download.
Google software engineer Reza Behforooz said March 30 that the engine pre-loads the top result into the cache of Mozilla browsers. "Now Google's faster than ever on Firefox and Mozilla browsers," he said on Google’s blog. "When you do a search on these browsers, we instruct them to download your top search result in advance, so if you click on it, you'll get to that page even more quickly."
The new feature can’t be used by Internet Explorer or other browsers, however, because they don’t support such a feature.
