Google Speeds Up Results for Firefox

Software engineer Reza Behforooz announced Wednesday on the Google Blog that the company has added "prefetching" to some searches, which instructs the Web browser to automatically start downloading the top result. The feature is only available in Mozilla and Firefox, and can be optionally disabled.

By prefetching the destination site's content, users that click the top search result will find the page loads much faster. Sites that want to block or ignore prefetch requests can do so by configuring their Web server. Google notes that with prefetching, "you may end up with cookies and web pages in your web browser's cache from web sites that you did not click on."