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Google Results // URL prefetching

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hugo
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Joined: 14 Jun 2003
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Location: Netherlands, Europe

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PostPosted: Wed May 11, 2005 10:16 am    Post subject: Google Results // URL prefetching Reply with quote

I was Googling when I suddenly noticed some cookie being set for some certain domain in the results. Now I don't like that.

Looking at the source-code of the results, I noticed the following statements in there:
Code:
<LINK REL=prefetch HREF='http://example.com/'>
.

This tag allows websites to turn on prefetching on Mozilla browsers. Some more Googling turned up this page, which states:
mozillazine.org wrote:
Google Blog is reporting that Google is now faster on Firefox and Gecko-based browsers. Google has started using prefetching to start downloading top results even before the user clicks on them. This allows the user to view search results faster. Prefetching is not available on Internet Explorer and other non-mozilla browsers.

Google Help adds that prefetching could end up with cookies from unvisited sites and provides Firefox settings to disable it.


So of course, I disabled the network.prefetch-next setting in about:config in my Mozilla based browser, which is something some of you also might want to do not to end up with a load of unwanted cookies (and visiting sites you are not aware of).
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zeedo
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Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Posts: 24
Location: Scotland

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PostPosted: Wed May 11, 2005 10:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You can also manage your cookie settings by keeping a whitelist of sites you allow cookies from. Do this by unchecking the "Allow sites to set cookies" box in the PRivacy -> Cookies Section under options/preferences.

There also a few extensions for easing the management of cookies, I really like "Permit Cookies".

I generally don't mind the prefetching and find it quite useful as long as the cookies are not set and as long as the sites aren't loading into my history, which they aren't.
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