Quick Tip: Turn off Prefetching in Firefox

by Lowell Heddings on

Firefox has a spooky feature called “Prefetching” that downloads pages that it thinks you are going to click on. (note: this is a good excuse for how those pages ended up in your history). It’s also a waste of CPU and bandwidth that slows Firefox down.

To turn off this behavior, type about:config into the address bar, and then type the following into the Filter bar:

network.prefetch-next

image

Just double-click the item in the list to change it to false.

Lowell Heddings, better known online as the How-To Geek, spends all his free time bringing you fresh geekery on a daily basis. You can follow him on if you'd like.