When the best is enemy of the good
When the best is enemy of the good(from "Le meilleur est l'ennemi du bien" - Voltaire)
If you go on this url :
with Firefox 3.5 or greater and the first result as below is "mailedu.ge.ch" (this may change in the future or depending on your parameters) this is what happens :
And this could come to a shock. At least it was for me. What ? A certificate problem with google ?
Everytime you tries, same problem.
What the ... ?
Well funnily enough, this should happen very rarely. The reason is that Google engineers have probably realized that most of the time when a user is searching with google, he will click on the first result.
On the other hand, mozilla implemented in Firefox a new "prefetch" mechanism. This is derived from the old "internet accelerators" when some developers/users thought it was good to have a program "clicking" for you on links to prefetch the pages in order for the user to have it already in its browser cache before he made his choice on which he wants to click on. (Supposedly reaaaally useful when ... you have a low-bandwidth connection).
At least this time it is better "organised" : it is the webmaster who decide or not to put special tags in his html to enable this feature, example :
So in the case of google, they automatically add for their firefox user this prefetch link on the first (and only the first) result in the list.
In this case, and only since the latest version of Firefox (3.5) firefox tries to pre-fetch the mailedu https link... which sadly has a problem with its certificate.