A great tool I discovered for Firefox quite a long time ago was Fasterfox. It basically tweaks browser settings to speed up browsing.

It now includes a pre-fetching tool. This means that when you’re on a certain page, it saves all the links on that page into a cache, so that when you want to click on it, the page loads up almost instantaneously.

It is great to browse with it activated, seeing the pages load up so quickly. But I have a kind of moral dilemma as to whether to use it. Some of the problems are:

• It uses up more bandwidth, costing webmasters money
• It may cost money to pay-by-click advertisers
• It will give false results to website statistics
• It may slow the Internet down for my flatmates, who use the same connection

I’d be interested in hearing other people’s opinions on this. Do any of you use pre-fetching? Do you think it is a good idea?