Chrome 17 preloads autocompleted URLs as you type
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
You can use the "X-Purpose: instant" HTTP header to detect these requests. If you're really paranoid, you can return those requests with "403 Forbidden" responses, or your analytics company will have to take these headers into account.
Not a good feature if you ask me.
On Chrome for Android they use this feature, too, but it's on default for "Wi-Fi only". I guess they could make a similar setting for laptops that use 3G connections, too.
"Prerender from omnibox
Enables prerendering of suggestions from the Omnibox and predicts appropriate network actions (prerendering, Instant, DNS preconnect) by calculating a confidence value for each Omnibox result."
Your options are Automatic, Enabled, Disabled. Default was Automatic.
Also, preloading and rendering something like ten pages in parallel when I really want only one implies wasted wattage. There goes your battery too.
For example, you connect your laptop onto your employers network, and want to look up several things about face detection. You start typing "face" and each time Chrome goes off and fetches your Facebook page. You get fired for repeatedly visiting Facebook at work. Thanks, Chrome!
You're loading things from Facebook on a very high percentage of websites, so if you were really going to get fired for HTTP requests to Facebook, it would have already happened a long time ago.
Not if you're "at-will".
One I used was called Fasterfox.
"Prefetching is considered an aggressive practice when it's initiated by the client, and plug-ins like Fasterfox have been widely criticized for supporting it"
http://code.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/pagevisibility.htm...
A cool feature, but I think this should be opt-in.
Since you probably don't "frequently" visit malware-filled websites, this shouldn't be an issue - although I wonder if Chrome would load it anyway or not.. It seems to do a better job than most browsers of pre-emptively warning you when you try to visit a dangerous website, at least in my experience.
Plus, this seems like a cheap way to look like your browser is faster.
It's a legitimate whinge.
It seems you like that feature. I respect that, just like I totally understand that for some users 'instant search' on Google is a good feature. For me this is a misfeature though and, given the potential network abuse, shouldn't be on by default.
Ignore the mobile network: Every hotel I've been to in Europe and Israel had very crappy wifi quality. I'm pretty sure that I'll hate sitting in a lobby with or on the same floor as Chrome users with that setting turned on (granted: Depends on usage patterns and how frequent this feature would jump into life). On those connections I can easily throttle myself to death by opening three tabs.
Please don't go for the low-hanging 'fix the network' here. I cannot. And that's a real world scenario that will become worse by a setting that defaults to true although it might very well create problems for the user _and others around him_.
Also, I'd imagine Chrome is right a good portion of the time which is no extra bandwidth at all, just faster. It's also pages you frequently visit, which means the cache will almost always be used (visiting Google uses a whopping 1.5KB). Furthermore, Chrome automatically updates itself, which is also going to use a lot of bandwidth. Everyone here seems to love the auto updates...
If you have bandwidth trouble, it's not unreasonable to flip a few switches. For everyone else, the better experience is probably worthwhile.
That's 1097 preloads and the base 3G rate (3Gb) in the UK is used up. 1Mb after that costs about $1.50 so each subsequent preload of CNET would cost you $4.20. Does that sound fair? 3G monthly bills will hit the thousand dollar mark with little effort.
On a standard ADSL plan in the UK (5Gb), that is 1828 preloads and the data allowance is used up. After that, rate limiting kicks in which makes everything bar browsing light weight web sites unusable.
That's not many.
It's totally offensive usage of my connection and if it's turned on by default, people are going to get screwed badly.
The better experience point is a load of shit - it's a workaround for crap sites which don't load in a reasonable amount of time the first time.
It's not the browser's job to make "intelligent" decisions for me.