How To Disable Google / Firefox Prefetch

On Jan 30, 2010

If you use the Firefox browser in conjunction with the Google search engine, Google will (under various circumstances) prefetch the first page returned in the results. In other words, that page and any cookies associated will be downloaded to your computer even though you never clicked the link. Here’s how to disable this Google / Firefox “feature”.

Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: 1 minute

Steps:

Open the Firefox browser
Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter
Scroll down the resulting preference list to network.prefetch-next
Double click network.prefetch-next so the value is set to false.
Close Firefox and restart it to enable the change.