Segmentation Fault Kore Dumped

We recently (few hours back, to be precise) enabled RSS feeds for our service. For each search result page we provide a link to RSS feed with HTML's link tag in the head as follows.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/feed/[FEED-URL]" />

While accessing these pages, I also observed the access log of webserver. Mysteriously, I found the requests to the feed URLs in the log.

This was observation with Firefox. To confirm the problem is not in my code, I used Live HTTP Headers Firefox add-on to see the requests being sent. Firefox was indeed requesting the feed URL. And if the page had multiple RSS feed links (like GigaOm), Firefox fetches all those links.

I accessed the same page with IE. The requests to feed URLs just weren't there. Even Chrome was not sending any requests for feed URLs.

The only reason to justify this behaviour of Firefox is to check if the RSS icon for the page needs to be shown in the address bar. But, I fail to understand why Firefox just doesn't trust the publisher.

But this is wrong on so many counts. First, it adds latency for the user. Secondly, it wastes bandwidth - of user and the publisher. Third, it adds unnecessary load on the server,

In a nut shell, this is a serious bug.

Labels: firefox