Fasterfox is one of the most popular extensions for Firefox. It is currently ranked as the 3rd most downloaded extension for Firefox on Mozilla Update page. (aka. Firefox Add-ons) The latest version of Fasterfox, v1.0.3, checks the for the robots.txt file on the site the viewer is visiting to check whether it should pre-fetch or not. This new feature allows webmasters to add the following text (in bold) to their robots.txt file to prevent Fasterfox from pre-fetching links. Text To Add To ‘robots.txt’:

User-agent: Fasterfox
Disallow: /

Why should you do this? To save bandwidth. If Firefox is prefetching pages from your site you are giving up bandwidth to that visitor whether or not the pages are actually viewed. If you have a low volume site this probably isn’t a problem. But…

Another reason to stop Fasterfox has to do with accurate page visit tracking. If you are trying to mount any kind of search engine optimization campaign there’s a huge potential here to bloat your hit statistics. Firefox is visiting all your pages whether or not the user actually does. How will you know if that special tweak you spent so long figuring out is actually increasing page hits? You can’t if Firefox scours all the pages on your site.

From the original by Skatter Tech

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2006 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.