Vim & Vision

[ #122 ] Firefox Prefetching Permalink

Firefox Added a year and a bit ago and last edited a year and a bit ago

There has been some talk and concern about the firefox browser's "page prefetching feature." (Yes it's very old, but it still comes up neat the top of google results for "firefox prefetching".)

The rumours are that firefox defaults to prefetching some pages that it thinks you might go to next.

The official word from firefox is that the prefetching only happens when the original page has link tags with a rel attribute equal to next or prefetch!

<link rel="prefetch" href="URL">

Mozilla talk about firefox link prefetching here.

But there is a notion of "google prefetching" where, when a google search occurs, firefox prefetches the most likely pages you will click on according to google (which would surely be the very first link, right?). This is discussed here and also here.

So does firefox use both? Sources indicate that they are one and the same... that so-called "google prefetching" is just google correctly using a link tag with a rel attribute equal to prefetch in their search results page, like we learned above.

The way to turn this prefetching off, should you so desire: