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According to the Google Chrome Blog for Thursday, January 5, 2012, Chrome had added a beta feature where it sometimes loads a web page in the background before you finish typing the URL. When you do finish and press enter, it can just display it. I can confirm that as of version 17, this feature is in the stable release.

How can I turn off this prefetching?

Why

I am a developer, and this feature just caused me some confusion; it appeared that one of my web apps was doing a "double redirect", but the actual cause was that Chrome requested the page once while I was typing the URL and again when I pressed enter. (This behavior is not totally consistent, either.)

What I've tried

I have searched for "prediction" in preferences and unchecked the following:

  • "Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar"
  • "Predict network actions to improve page load performance", but the problem persists (at least for loading sites hosted on my own machine).
Nathan Long
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4 Answers4

28

To turn off prerendering completely, disable the following:

  • Predict network actions to improve page load performance

    chrome://settings/advanced

    under the hood

  • Prerender from omnibox

    chrome://flags/

    flags

iglvzx
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4

Yes, you can. The google developer whitepaper on prerendering, in the "Debugging prerendering" section, says:

You also have the option of disabling the Chrome 17+ feature that can initiate prerendering based on user interaction with the address bar. To disable this type of prerendering, start Chrome with a command-line flag of --prerender-from-omnibox=disabled.

Read the whole section/whitepaper. It's full of good stuff.

Zac B
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2

It now appears to be here:

Cookies and other site data > Preload pages for faster browsing and searching

Henry
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1

Update 2019

In July 2018, Google introduced NoState Prefetch

NoState Prefetch is a new mechanism in Chrome that is an alternative to the deprecated prerendering process

The process to disable this looks a little different than iglvzx's answer.

  • Disable page load prediction service

chrome://settings/ -> expand Advanced section

enter image description here

  • Disable NoState Prefetch

chrome://flags -> search for "nostate"

enter image description here

Stack Underflow
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