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Saturday, April 02, 2005
Just Say NO to Google Prefetching
Google has taken advantage of Firefox to implement a prefetching tool that affects some searches.
Prefetching loads the top results of a search into the browserâs cache. If any of these first results are clicked on they will load faster then normally.
The problem is that the cookies and other parts of the pages get downloaded to your hard drive even if you don`t visit the page.
If these intial pages contain evil scripts or more simply are dubious sites that contain spyware, tracking icons, etc you are caught before you know it.
To prevent this "prefetching" open Firefox and follow the steps below:
1. In Firefox type "about:config" (without the quotes) in the address bar.
2. In the list that appears double-click the line "network.prefetch-next" (without the quotes).
3. The 'value' will change from TRUE to FALSE.
4. That's it.
Prefetching loads the top results of a search into the browserâs cache. If any of these first results are clicked on they will load faster then normally.
The problem is that the cookies and other parts of the pages get downloaded to your hard drive even if you don`t visit the page.
If these intial pages contain evil scripts or more simply are dubious sites that contain spyware, tracking icons, etc you are caught before you know it.
To prevent this "prefetching" open Firefox and follow the steps below:
1. In Firefox type "about:config" (without the quotes) in the address bar.
2. In the list that appears double-click the line "network.prefetch-next" (without the quotes).
3. The 'value' will change from TRUE to FALSE.
4. That's it.
