Bug 237632 – Consider disabling pre-fetching for .new domains

• Status: NEW
• Component: Page Loading

Google has set up the .new TLD to allow companies to create quick web shortcuts to create new content. For example visiting https://presentation.new will create a new Google Slides presentation or https://blog.new will create a new WordPress.com blog account/site.

Technically these URIs break the HTTP spec in that GET requests are supposed to be [safe](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Safe/HTTP) and not alter the state of the server but I was wondering if WebKit should be pragmatic about this and disable link pre-fetching for sites in the .new TLD (if it's even feasible to decide on a per-domain or per-TLD basis).

The prompt for this is that I just found several untitled documents in my work Google Drive that were created by Safari pre-fetching https://forms.new, https://sheets.new and https://slides.new.

Realistically, the Google apps teams should be detecting these requests and automatically deleting the "drafts" that get created by pre-fetching but given the purpose of the .new TLD and the side-effects from visiting a .new domain I thought I'd raise the question.

P.S. I wasn't sure how to categorise this bug so I modelled it off bug 42501

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Thank you for the report. I think that full support for this would require changes not just in WebKit, but also in browsers that use it (it is Safari that decides whether to preload when the user is typing into an address bar).

To me personally, this does feel like something for Google to potentially rethink.

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/90106544>

[Alex Christensen]

It sounds like Google wants to change the rules of HTTP but only for their new TLD.  If that is true, it sounds misguided.