Google Speeds Up Results for Firefox

[WolfmanNCSU]

Software engineer Reza Behforooz announced Wednesday on the Google Blog that the company has added "prefetching" to some searches, which instructs the Web browser to automatically start downloading the top result. The feature is only available in Mozilla and Firefox, and can be optionally disabled.

By prefetching the destination site's content, users that click the top search result will find the page loads much faster. Sites that want to block or ignore prefetch requests can do so by configuring their Web server. Google notes that with prefetching, "you may end up with cookies and web pages in your web browser's cache from web sites that you did not click on."

Link (http://www.google.com/help/features.html#prefetch)

[Viper]

Good and bad. Good if you don't have a fast connection to start with so any speed boost is helpful but bad that cookies, images and others can be dumped into TEMP without you knowing it or wanting it.


I think I myself will turn it off. I doubt I'd even notice a load time difference.

[WolfmanNCSU]

Exactally. Plus I hope these top searches that it wants to prefetch are clean. I don't want the top search to be Paris Hilton Sex Tape and start to dump cookies and images.