by Tom Nelson
Safari, along with just about every other browser, now includes DNS prefetching, a feature designed to make surfing the web a speedier experience by looking at all of the links embedded in a web page and querying your DNS server to resolve each link to its actual IP address.
Screen shot © Coyote Moon, Inc.
When DNS prefetching is working well, by the time you click on a link on a web site, your browser already knows the IP address and is ready to load the requested page. This means very fast response times as you move from page to page.
So, how can this be a bad thing? Well, it turns out that DNS prefetching can have some interesting drawbacks, although only under specific conditions. While most browsers now have DNS prefetching, we’re going to concentrate on Safari, since it’s the leading browser for the Mac.
