Blocking Fasterfox To Save Your Sanity and Your Wallet

So with all the cool tools users are making to expediate their web browsing some are causing webmasters headaches to no end.

One of the more popular add-ins is Fasterfox, a plugin that allows the caching of linked pages everytime a user views a site. For those with limited bandwith constraints this can spell the disaster and result in exorbitant bills from web hosters.

Skatter Tech comes to the rescue though with two simple lines of text you can add to your robots.txt file that will save your bandwith and stop Fasterfox dead in its tracks.

Skatter Tech: Fasterfox is in fact one of the most popular extensions for Firefox. It is currently ranked as the 3rd most downloaded extension for Firefox on Mozilla Update page. (aka. Firefox Add-ons) The latest version of Fasterfox, v1.0.3, checks the for the robots.txt file on the site the viewer is visiting to check whether it should pre-fetch or not. This new feature allows webmasters to add the following text (in bold) to their robots.txt file to prevent Fasterfox from pre-fetching links. Text To Add To “robots.txt”:

1. User-agent: Fasterfox
2. Disallow: /

Adding these two lines somewhere in your robots.txt file and placing it in the root folder will prevent Fasterfox from pre-fetching links anywhere on your site. (ex: yourwebsite.com/robots.txt)