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).
Predict network actions to improve page load performance
should have done the trick. Did you restart your browser afterwards?