What is Prefetching
Link Prefetching is a concept introduced by Firefox and Google as late as 2005, but still many people do not know much about it. Link Prefetching actually is a mechanism through which Firefox utilizes some of its idle time to prefetch web pages, which it thinks your are likely to visit next from the currently open web page. After the current web page has finished loading and some idle time has passed, Firefox starts link prefetching and silently loads the next probable page in its cache. The purpose of Link Prefetching is to enhance your user experience by quickly load your next page by serving it quickly out out of Firefox Cache.
Google has been supporting Link Prefetching, and when you search for any keyword in Google through Firefox, the first link displayed gets prefetched to your browser cache.
But, Is Link Prefetching always Good ?
Link Prefetching feature of Firefox looks nice on the face of it, as it speeds up your Browsing speed by utilizing your idle time.
But there is a lot of criticism against Link Prefetching by Firefox. Some of the issues are…
- Users who pay for the amount of bandwidth they use find themselves paying for traffic for pages they might not even visit.
- Webmasters who pay for the amount of outgoing traffic on their sites, are forced to pay for traffic generated by people who may never actually visit their sites.
- Advertisers pay for viewed ads on sites that are never visited (non-compliant prefetching)
- Browser usage statistics may get skewed towards browsers that implement prefetching.
- Search engine referer statistics may get skewed towards search engines that implement prefetching.
- Web site statistics may become less reliable due to registering page hits that were never seen by the user.
- Users may be exposed to more security risks - by downloading more pages, or from un-requested sites (additionally compounded as drive-by downloads become more advanced and diverse).
- Users may find themselves at legal risk if illegal content is prefetched. So, the choice is yours.
If you prefer to Disable Link Prefetching, then proceed as follows.
How to Disable Link Prefetching in Firefox
Firefox has the Link Prefetching feature ON by default, and there is no option in the Firefox properties Dialog Box, which allows you to disable Link Prefetching. You have to do it manually by editing the about:config entries. Follow these steps for that.
- Open the Firefox browser
- Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter
- Scroll down the resulting preference list to network.prefetch-next
- Double click network.prefetch-next so the value is set to false.
- Close Firefox and restart it to enable the change.
How to Enable Link Prefetching for all Links on a webpage
In case, you are an ardent supporter of Link Prefetching, there is a nice Firefox Extension. You can use Fasterfox, which has an option to enable the prefetching of all page links by the browser.
July 30th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Very interesting~!
I recently have been studying SEO and driving traffic to my blog (Internet Marketing Techniques) and paying for traffic.
This seems pretty important and I really don’t like the idea of paying for visits to links that weren’t manually visited.
It’s times like this I get scared by the power the internet has and how super powerful it will be someday.
I can see the benefit for some people who don’t have high speed internet but for advertisers this could be terrible!
July 31st, 2008 at 8:49 pm
This is mostly ignored firefox tweak, even i have listed this in my 21 about config firefox 3 hacks list
August 1st, 2008 at 3:56 am
thx for this information this is really good n interesting…..
i will try this one n get back 2 u soon ….thx a lot Dude
October 27th, 2008 at 6:12 am
I go between countries that (like the U.S.) has unlimited bandwidth all over. So I can turn this on to the max, but then I’m in countries like South Africa where you pay the highest prices for your bandwidth.
So I’d rather not enable and forget about it.
But completely disabling is a good idea, especially here. (ZA)