"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," says David on the 37signals blog.
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.
Comment: The comments to the post show there are at least two sides to the argument. What isn't discussed are the possibly dramatic effects of decisions that Google can make internally and unilaterally, without any visible discussion.
