On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 4:56 PM, <clo...@gmail.com> wrote: > My point was that just because it is in my history, does not necessarily > mean I intentionally visited it. Maybe I lent my computer to someone else > or clicked on a link by mistake. (By the way, I fully understand why the > assumption that if it's in the history then it was intentional was made. > I'm just undecided on whether I agree with the assumption or not.) I was > asking for more information about the algorithm, e.g. is there a > frequency/recency component to understand how visiting a link only a few > times would impact this. But as you suggested, I can read the code and take > a look at it if I'm really interested. I fully understand that you're not > arbitrarily opening connections, by the way. >
So for a quick answer to your question, yes, there is a frecency-like algorithm for this. It's even tuneable (to an extent) via prefs! (I'm working on a blog post about this feature that will go into more detail on this, keep an eye on Planet Mozilla, hopefully I'll find the cycles to finish it within the next week or so.) > My concern is that by going to a site (yahoo.com, in your example), I'm > not saying that I currently "trust" any of the other sites linked off > there, even if I've been there before. If I trust them I'll go to them. > So perhaps we're talking past each other (always a possibility!), but my understanding of this sentence indicates to me that I've not done a good job of explaining to you what exactly it is this feature does. My understanding is that you think we're opening connections to all the links on a page, or perhaps going even further and opening connections to hosts used by the pages linked to. We aren't doing that at all. (Note that we *do* make DNS requests for every link on a page, but that is independent of this feature, and has existed for much longer than this feature.) What we *are* doing is opening connections to hosts that serve content that is required to fully load a page you're visiting. For example, lots of sites host the HTML on their own domain, but host things like js, css, and images on a CDN somewhere (with a different domain name, or a set of sharded domains names). What we're doing is (effectively) keeping track of what CDNs we loaded stuff from when you visited yahoo.com (to keep the example), and then the next time you go to yahoo.com, we'll open connections to those CDNs before we have the full HTML parsed (or do DNS lookups for those CDNs, or do nothing, depending on what the frecency algorithm decides is the Right Thing). Does that explain it better? (Or, alternately, did you already understand that, and I totally misread what you were saying, and I just wasted a couple minutes and a few hundred bytes typing stuff you already understood? :-) ) > Thanks for ensuring that this was considered before this feature was > implemented! By the way, please don't try to think I'm knocking this > feature at all. I'm sure you've put a lot of good work and thought into it. > I'm just trying to adequately understand the privacy ramifications. > That's totally fair, and I'm not trying to knock your questions. Thanks for asking them, and keeping us all honest! -Nick _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
