Jun
FasterFox Sucks
Literally. Fasterfox is a Firefox extension that sucks all of your server’s resources and your bandwidth for nothing!
It’s supposed to help its users by “prefetching” web pages that they might visit in the future. But what it really does is screw webmasters. If someone with FasterFox browses your site, it will visit every single link on your page so it can cache them, just in case the visitor decides to click one later. If they do, the page will supposedly load faster for that user.
But for that one link the user clicks, the FasterFox bot could easily waste 100 times that amount of bandwidth. So if you don’t want your bandwidth wasted, you’ll want to create a robots.txt file to block Fasterfox.
You might be thinking, “wouldn’t allowing Fasterfox enhance my user’s experience so they like my site more?” The answer could be yes, but the question is all wrong. You should be asking, “how can I make my website load as fast as possible for everyone?” You’d be better off caching your pages than allowing this bandwidth eating bot anywhere near your site.
So let’s get to that robots.txt file…
If you don’t yet have a robots.txt file, all you have to do is open up Notepad, create a blank document, and save it as robots.txt. Then upload that to the root directory of your website.
To block Fasterfox, just add these two lines of code to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: Fasterfox
Disallow: /
Be sure to upload the updated file to your site.
Now you can recommend Firefox without worry that Fasterfox will affect your site!
(I first heard about this thanks to Revenue Girl.)
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The user can easily switch off prefetching. Go to Add-ons in the Tools menu, click Options in the Fasterfox entry in Extentions, switch to Courteous and then back to Custom in the Presets menu, and that is the right place to do this: In the Pipelining menu, Enable Pipelining and Enable Proxy Pipelining, and set Max Pipelining Requests to 10. In Rendering, set Pages In Memory to 10. This procedure should get rid of any prefetching problems and still allow great speed.
Fasterfox no longer reports its useragent as “fasterfox” — it uses the exact same UA firefox uses. So blocking Fasterfox in robots.txt won’t do you any good.
Mozilla actually recommends checking for the X-Moz: prefetch header and returning a 404 if you want to disallow prefetching
Fasterfox does send this header.
@frank
Well that sucks! Thanks for the update though.