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Firefox pre-fetches some special pages when they are returnto
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Description

Since bug 16707 resolved, MediaWiki sets rel="next" to the returnto. Although the stated reason is for UX (e.g. it mentions Opera can show some kind of Next link/button), it has other impacts.

Firefox (and possibly other browsers) use this as a pre-fetching hint. For regular pages, this can be fine. However, some special pages (I know of ConfirmEmail and InvalidateEmail, but there may be others) take an action on a regular GET request, even though this isn't generally best practice.

Firefox will not pre-fetch if there is a query string (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=175418), so my proposed fix adds this to the rel=next URL, only for special pages that don't already have a query string. It does not affect the actual displayed returnto link (<a> element).


Version: 1.21.x
Severity: normal
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16707

Details

Reference
bz46680

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.Nov 22 2014, 1:27 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz46680.

The consensus there was that rel="next" is not really correct here, because e.g. the prev of the page you're going to was not the, e.g. login page, and two pages isn't really a sequence.

So I'm now proposing to just remove the rel="next":

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/56624/

(In reply to comment #2)

The consensus there was that rel="next" is not really correct here, because
e.g. the prev of the page you're going to was not the, e.g. login page, and
two
pages isn't really a sequence.

So I'm now proposing to just remove the rel="next":

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/56624/

Merged.

Related URL: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/59620 (Gerrit Change I6a51e3ee07fe7622b9c708c78563795d7a1118fc)