Google has given Mozilla based browsers like Firefox a little present. Basically when a Firefox user does a Google search, Google will preload the most likely result for you so that if you click on the first result, you will see the page much more quickly then you otherwise would.

Not everyone is happy with the functionality, many believe that it could be a waste of bandwidth and a possible future security concern. I’m of the opinion that as long as they give you an option to turn it on, (and leave it off by default) then it’s a useful additional service to Mozilla users. My own tendency is to do searches based on lists of words, so it’s quite unusual when the first result is the one I want, the result is that this is not likely to be of that much use to me and might waste bandwidth (which is why I’d like the option to turn it on or off.) The prefetch feature isn’t available on non-Mozilla browsers like Internet Explorer as they don’t currently support it.

What I’d like to see, is a Google Firefox extension that works with Firefox and Google’s results page so that checkboxes are put next to each result, you then mark all the checkboxes next to possible positive results and then click a “Open in tabs” button and have all the check marked pages open in new tabs. That would really speed up my search experience.

This article was posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2005 at 8:18 pm