the corner office

A LWN article discusses the fact that Firefox prefetches certain web pages for you. Basically, Firefox tries to be smart and if it thinks you're likely to follow a link (say, one labelled 'next'), it goes and downloads that page so that it'll load faster when (if) you do click on it. The LWN article points out some of the potential security and privacy issues this can cause. Interestingly, Google is already taking advantage of this feature.

Not cool, imho. Sure, when you load a web page a lot of stuff might be referenced and pulled down to your browser, and that's just the way web browsing works - but in principle I'd prefer it if my browser didn't load separate web pages until I specifically asked it to. Least of all, the default configuration should be to switch this feature off, and let users choose to enable it if they feel it's something they want.

The easiest way to disable prefetching is to do the following: type about:config in the Firefox location bar, find the setting network.prefetch-next and toggle it to false.