Stopping DNS Prefetching

[Tunnelcat]

How can I stop Firefox from doing DNS prefetching? I've done both of Mozilla's solutions and it keeps on doing it.

[woodchip]

Did you just load firefox or did the prefetch problem occur after you had firefox loaded for a long while?
If the latter, try unloading firefox, run a virus scanner (or two) and then reload fire fox and see what happens.

[fliptw]

DNS Prefetching has been in most browsers for years.

Is there a particular reason you think its needs to be disabled?

[Tunnelcat]

I know this is a trivial gripe, but I'm getting tired of all the event log DNS errors it throws whenever a website doesn't respond or exist. Woodchip, Firefox has done this since Mozilla implemented it many revs back. No viruses are on any of my systems that have Firefox, and they all do it. The browser also only DNS prefetches once a day on any particular website it's visited, even after a reboot during the day.

[woodchip]

where or how do you see this is happening? So I can see if mine is doing it.

[Tunnelcat]

where or how do you see this is happening? So I can see if mine is doing it.

Go into your Event Viewer in Administrative Tools and look under Custom Views, then under Administrative Events (top left pane) after it finishes loading. It will show as a Warning called DNS Client Events. It's also in the System section of the Windows Logs, but you have to find it in a big list, so it's easier to spot it under Administrative Events at the top left.

[Krom]

The only DNS errors I get logged in there are from timeouts when the cable connection goes down, something which happens often enough that we are going to switch to fiber when it becomes available (sometime this month, drop is already installed on the house, only needs the final hookup).

[fliptw]

Disabling the prefetching won't prevent those errors; it means your ISP's dns servers are a bit overloaded, and firefox isn't doing anything wrong.

[Tunnelcat]

I know that one link I keep getting DNS errors for is a particular dead link on a friend's personal web page. I also get it from link timeouts on another forum I regularly visit. So why am I getting the warnings if it's not caused by prefetching? I'm not regularly losing connections on my DSL either. It's slow, but it doesn't drop out very often, unless we get an ice storm, like yesterday.

Krom, I'm jealous. What are you going to get? A gigabit with that fiber?

[Krom]

Try switching to OpenDNS or Google DNS and see if it makes any difference, might just be crappy and or poorly configured ISP DNS servers dropping out.

I'm getting one of the more basic packages which is 100/40 mbit, however 1000/400 is also available.

[Tunnelcat]

I'll try exploring that option. Thanks. As for your new internet connection.....lucky stiff.