Recently, Google has began prefetching pages when searches are conducted using Mozilla browsers such as Firefox. Prefetching loads the top results of the search into the browser’s cache. The result being that if you click on that link the page will load quickly. The problem becomes that a page’s cookies and other junk gets downloaded to your hard drive even if you do not visit the page. Firefox users can prevent prefetching by following the steps below:

1. Open a blank tab and type “about:config” in the address bar.
2. A list will appear, double click on the line “network.prefetch-next”.
3. The line’s value should change from “true” to “false” and you should notice the line is now highlighted.
4. Close the tab.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 4th, 2005 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.