How To Turn Off Prefetching in Firefox

I always wondered how it is possible for Firefox to eat a huge amount of memory and up to 60-70% of a decent CPU without browsing 10 Flash sites at once, and today I found a possible answer - it may be the prefetch feature!

This feature does nothing more than downloading various pages that you may open by clicking the links located on the page you are currently visiting, trying to predict your browsing behaviour. Anyway, we're here to disable it, not to get to know it better, so let's get down to business, shall we?

- If Firefox is not open already, open it and type "about:config" in the address bar, followed by the Enter key.


- Type "network.prefetch-next" into the Filter bar, so that we can see only the option we need to change.


- Double click the highlighted field to change its value from "true" to "false".


This is it! As easy as it gets, don't you think? Try this for yourselves and don't forget to let us know if this trick improved your Firefox experience or not. Anyway, if you're not happy with the changes, simply go through the steps above once more to get back to the default setting.