Pyschic browsers that are so fast it's spooky.

If the URL auto-completes to a site you’re very likely to visit, Chrome will begin to prerender the page.

Chrome can only "guess" what you are likely to visit and if it's not the prerendered page then Chrome just wasted the web site owner's bandwidth for nothing.

Does this Chrome version come with a compensation package for wasted bandwidth ? .... I guess not

The question is, does this beastie send the X-moz prefetch header?

The (now defunct) Google Web Accelerator claimed to take this sensible step:

Prefetch requests include an "x-moz: prefetch" HTTP header. Websites can choose to filter out prefetch requests in their server statistics, as well as reject prefetch requests, which would cause the request to be sent only when a user actually clicks on a link.

Source: [webaccelerator.google.com...]

Does Google no longer allow webmasters to reject prefetch requests?

And if not, why not?

...

wow thats going to put plenty of unneeded network load all over the place.

Chrome can only "guess" what you are likely to visit and if it's not the prerendered page then Chrome just wasted the web site owner's bandwidth for nothing.

Not so sure about that. Start typing in www.faceb and you can be sure you'll end up at a lame social networking site. Go for www.bing and you'll get to a search engine that hardly anyone uses!

Hopefully they get it right, I have had nothing but problems with prefetching turned on.

Does anyone like this feature?

Go for www.bing and you'll get to a search engine that hardly anyone uses!

And bingo players derailed.

Does anyone like this feature?

As a webmaster I naturally despise it as wasteful and unnecessary.

As a user I loathe "features" that try to guess my intentions, especially visible ones that can't be turned off (possibly not the case here).

I would guess that the primary reason for it is so Google can promote their Chrome browser as faster than the competition - while making webmasters pay for the extra speed.

...

I would rather Chrome (or pretty much most software) concentrate on optimising existing code. Thats the only reason I use it.

I would guess that the primary reason for it is so Google can promote their Chrome browser as faster than the competition

exactly my thought and I do not want nor need Google to fetch my websites pages just in case. I take great pride in making my site as fast as it can be already. How do I disable Chrome from being able to do so?

This burns my barnacles actually, coming from the company that does not allow automated calls to load it's pages (e.g. real visitors only).

[edited by: Sgt_Kickaxe at 2:26 am (utc) on Jan 10, 2012]

Prefetching is the kind of genius PhD thinking that can bring a public Wifi system down to it's knees. Got a couple of hundred people sitting in an airport terminal all prefetching away and you'll switch to 3G so fast it'll make your head spin. Then you notice the 3G speed degrading as everyone else in the room has the same bright idea.

Been blocking prefetch for years and not only do I block it, I put instructions on the page to prefetchers on how to disable it if possible because the masses don't even realize it's happening.

I have a perfectly good reason for blocking prefetch, very large dynamic site. A single surfer requesting multiple dynamic pages isn't a problem. But 20-30 concurrent surfers requesting a bunch of pages at once puts a load on the server. Normally 20-30 surfers prefetching wouldn't be so bad except the spiders are crawling the site non-stop as wll. Not only that, prefetch totally screws my ads, it screws with ad stats, it' screws with page view stats, it's chewing up my available bandwidth for the month, bad idea, stupid idea, a totally ill-conceived Google idea, the kind they see to do best these days ;)

It's right up there with no referers from search queries...

[edited by: incrediBILL at 2:29 am (utc) on Jan 10, 2012]

share Bill, I need to block this asap too. What's the simplest way of identifying/blocking a chrome pre-load ?

Until Google pays me to use my site in this manner I have no intention of allowing it.

I hope this will not make their huge ad popup at the bottom of the browser like they do with people who have their toolbar. Shady and intrusive of G to do that! Disgusts me they would intrude on a webpage or blog like that.

The price of not being Pandalized.

I'm pretty sure Google is going to work us all out of a job in about... 3 years time.

Need faster load times? Google offers them.

Need split testing on your webpage? Google offers it.

Need a simpe email domain setup? Google offers it.

Pretty soon they're going to be building webpages for free and placing adsense where they please.

This is google's contribution to green hosting I take it?

What if there is a natural disaster in Timbuktu, and as people start typing in Timbuktu searches, google contributes to using the valuable remaining resources in the affected place?

That's the code I put in all my web sites to block any kind of pre-fetching nonsense from Google and Mozilla, not sure if it's still up to date though:

RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Moz} ^prefetch$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Purpose} ^instant$
RewriteRule .* - [F]