Google and Firefox: Happy Together
March 31st, 2005, 8:10am by MikeAs if you needed another reason to use Firefox…
The Google Blog reports that Google now prefetches the first hit from searches to your browser, so that it’s faster to get to it (sort of an embedded “I’m Feeling Lucky,” I suppose) — but only if you’re using Firefox or Mozilla. Supposedly it’s not browser discrimination, but a feature present in Mozilla browsers that’s not in IE. Not sure if this actually slows down the loading of the search page itself, or whether this works on Google-affiliated search sites like A9. More info, including how to disable if desired, at the Google Help page.
You know that if this were something that only IE supported, the M$ bashers would be out yelling about how Microsoft was ruining the web with their non-standard web transport protocols or something. Just a thought.