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According to the Google Chrome Blog for Thursday, January 5, 2012, Chrome had added a beta feature where it sometimes loads a web page in the background before you finish typing the URL. When you do finish and press enter, it can just display it. I can confirm that as of version 17, this feature is in the stable release.

How can I turn off this prefetching?

Why

I am a developer, and this feature just caused me some confusion; it appeared that one of my web apps was doing a "double redirect", but the actual cause was that Chrome requested the page once while I was typing the URL and again when I pressed enter. (This behavior is not totally consistent, either.)

What I've tried

I have searched for "prediction" in preferences and unchecked the following:

  • "Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar"
  • "Predict network actions to improve page load performance", but the problem persists (at least for loading sites hosted on my own machine).
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4 Answers 4

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To turn off prerendering completely, disable the following:

  • Predict network actions to improve page load performance

    chrome://settings/advanced

    under the hood


  • Prerender from omnibox

    chrome://flags/

    flags

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  • 3
    was the omnibox option renamed/moved? I think now the only setting that controls both is the predict network actions one.
    – eglasius
    Aug 21, 2012 at 12:37
  • 1
    This answer still seems to work in Chrome 39, though the "Prerender from omnibox" setting does seem to have been removed.
    – Nick
    Dec 9, 2014 at 23:07
  • 2
    This setting is missing in Chrome 43. Is it baked in now, or was the feature dropped?
    – Langdon
    Jun 4, 2015 at 14:29
  • 2
    In Chrome 43 this seems to be controlled by "Prefetch resources to load pages more quickly" under "Show advanced settings..." at chrome://settings/
    – rlovtang
    Jul 21, 2015 at 10:31
  • 1
    @eglasius it's in the advanced settings now
    – user36099
    Jun 27, 2016 at 7:54
4

Yes, you can. The google developer whitepaper on prerendering, in the "Debugging prerendering" section, says:

You also have the option of disabling the Chrome 17+ feature that can initiate prerendering based on user interaction with the address bar. To disable this type of prerendering, start Chrome with a command-line flag of --prerender-from-omnibox=disabled.

Read the whole section/whitepaper. It's full of good stuff.

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2

It now appears to be here:

Cookies and other site data > Preload pages for faster browsing and searching

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Update 2019

In July 2018, Google introduced NoState Prefetch

NoState Prefetch is a new mechanism in Chrome that is an alternative to the deprecated prerendering process

The process to disable this looks a little different than iglvzx's answer.


  • Disable page load prediction service

chrome://settings/ -> expand Advanced section

enter image description here


  • Disable NoState Prefetch

chrome://flags -> search for "nostate"

enter image description here

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  • 4
    aaand it's gone this too.
    – DrLightman
    Feb 13, 2020 at 22:43
  • 1
    @DrLightman I recently permanently switched to Firefox because Chrome can't get their act together. Between stuff like this and the inability to see the protocol in the address bar, chrome has become unusable to me. Firefox is much better for developers. Feb 14, 2020 at 21:25

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