Christian Stocker has a new weblog post today that might interest anyone dealing with the prefetching "issues" that have arrisen around the Google Web Accelerator.

You certainly heard of Google Web Accelerator and why it can cause problems with some web-applications due to its prefetching. I won't go into any details here, it's well covered on other sites. But there's an easy solution to prevent prefetching on your site with the help of mod_rewrite.

The following lines will just send a "401 Access Denied" when the "x-moz: prefetch" header is present in the request (and hits an admin area link):
RewriteCond %{HTTP:x-moz} ^prefetch
RewriteRule ^/*admin/.* - [F,L]

The Google Web Accelerator is a nice tool, but you really have to watch out when you're using it in your applications. It "clicks" on the links it sees to fetch the content behind them - with the negative side effect of bypassing Javascript popups and executing whatever code happens to be behind the link with reckless abandon...