Can I turn off Google Chrome's new prerendering?

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).

google-chrome

Nathan Long

Posted 2012-02-27T14:52:39.767

Reputation: 20 371

According to Making web pages load faster (prerendering) - Google Chrome Help, disabling Predict network actions to improve page load performance should have done the trick. Did you restart your browser afterwards?

– Dennis – 2012-02-27T15:36:23.033

@Dennis - Yes, I did quit the browser and open it again. – Nathan Long – 2012-02-27T15:42:42.467

Answers

To turn off prerendering completely, disable the following:

Predict network actions to improve page load performance

chrome://settings/advanced

Prerender from omnibox

chrome://flags/

iglvzx

Posted 2012-02-27T14:52:39.767

Reputation: 21 611

This answer still seems to work in Chrome 39, though the "Prerender from omnibox" setting does seem to have been removed. – Nick – 2014-12-09T23:07:15.040

This setting is missing in Chrome 43. Is it baked in now, or was the feature dropped? – Langdon – 2015-06-04T14:29:59.443

In Chrome 43 this seems to be controlled by "Prefetch resources to load pages more quickly" under "Show advanced settings..." at chrome://settings/ – rlovtang – 2015-07-21T10:31:04.580

@eglasius it's in the advanced settings now – rightfold – 2016-06-27T07:54:43.060

2was the omnibox option renamed/moved? I think now the only setting that controls both is the predict network actions one. – eglasius – 2012-08-21T12:37:52.717

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.

Zac B

Posted 2012-02-27T14:52:39.767

Reputation: 2 653

Whitepaper no longer available at link above, however you can read it on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20120309113126/http://code.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/prerender.html

– Aron Griffis – 2015-10-26T22:36:18.737

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

Disable NoState Prefetch

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

Stack Underflow

Posted 2012-02-27T14:52:39.767

Reputation: 111

1aaand it's gone this too. – DrLightman – 2020-02-13T22:43:18.410

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. – Stack Underflow – 2020-02-14T21:25:40.303