How To Block Fasterfox To Save Bandwidth

[xpgeek]

I saw this on Digg today and found it to be very useful information for website owners.

I for one, even tho I don't run a website, hate the fasterfox extension, that prefetches something like 300 links on a page if it can. Good for the user, total raping of a sites bandwidth for the host. I find this ability in fasterfox to just be unethical.

How To Block Fasterfox Requests

Over the last few months the amount of visitors using Mozilla Firefox has grown to about 25%. The amount of bandwidth being used has also increased a large amount. Part of the reason behind this is that many Firefox users use an extension called “Fasterfox”. This extension “pre-fetches” links on a page so that if the user were to click on a link it would load much faster because its already been downloaded. This may be more convenient for viewer, but is a major problem for many webmasters who are low on bandwidth. Since Fasterfox constantly requests new files, it can cause many servers to overload much faster than if a person viewing the same content without Fasterfox were to view it.

Fasterfox is in fact 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”:

1. User-agent: Fasterfox
2. Disallow: /

Adding these two lines somewhere in your robots.txt file and placing it in the root folder will prevent Fasterfox from pre-fetching links anywhere on your site. (ex: yourwebsite.com/robots.txt) Webmasters can modify the text so that Fasterfox will only be prevented from pre-fetching on specified directories. Still have questions? Ask us! (reply in the comments)

Source and place to leave comments to author. (http://www.skattertech.com/2006/02/how-to-block-fasterfox-requests/)

[xpgeek]

For some real humor read the Digg comments about this.

http://digg.com/programming/How_To_Block_Fasterfox_To_Save_Bandwidth

[Vairkjosa]

Only one tiny little question.
If Fasterfox acts and responds like a spider, then why doesn't it show up in the logs?

Hrmmm! :wink:

[xpgeek]

That would be a question better asked to the guy that wrote that blog article how to block it, as he seems to know a lot about the extension.

I've never used it myself as I learned early on how aggressive its prefetching feature is and always thought it was an unethical feature.

[FisionChips]

I was using FasterFox but have removed it now - to be honest I never really noticed any benefit from using it.

[Vairkjosa]

I did read somewhere in that article that fasterfox was built into the newer versions of FFx. I've searched my ver. 1.5 and do not find it anywhere. Did they name it something else? I personally don't have any need whatsoever to load any more than I am looking at. I did not download the fasterfox extension. Nor do I have any use for it.

My theory is this: If you have to cache all that crap on your PC your doing more to slow yourself down in the long run. You also stand a better chance of getting something unwanted on your PC. I just can't imagine this as being a useful tool, especially if your visiting multiple sites. I also see no way of fasterfox being able to clear all that cache when it leaves a site for another one.
Sounds like a thief in the night. Maybe I'll go back to using IE.

[xpgeek]

The ability to Prefetch is built into Firefox, has been since 1.0. But its up to the site itself when its used and how much. Doing a Google search in Firefox will prefetch the first 5 results or so. The problem with Fasterfox is that it prefetches everything it can find, wayy too much, prefetches like, I'm not sure of the exact number but its a gigantic number, 300 links on a page. Sure it'll then make clicking any one of those links super fast to load because its already downloaded, but 300 ? A user will actually go to what, 10, 20 of em at most, 300 is just a rape of the sites bandwidth.

[xpgeek]

Oh, and if you really want to shut off all prefetching ability in Firefox for good, you just type about:config into the adress bar and hit enter or Go, then find the entry named network.prefetch-next and double click it to change its value to False, close and restart Firefox, and its off for good.