Stopping FireFox from autoloading RSS?

Question

I was working on a site recently and we adding an RSS link to the HTML header. Example:

<link href="/feed.rss" title="RSS Feed" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" />

The problem that we were having minor performance issues and when we looked into it we found that FireFox 3 was loading the RSS feed on every page load. We checked and re-checked this to confirm it was happening and tried turning on/off different extensions (firebug, developer, etc) and it was still happening. We also tried it on XP vs Vista vs OSX and it happened on all of them.

Has anyone seen this before and, if so, do you know of any way to stop it? It just seems quite unnecessary to load up the RSS feed on every page load like it is right now.

Answer 1

To my knowledge there is no way of doing this, simply because RSS is meant to provide an alternative way of aggregating the information on the site. Do you need an RSS feed for every page of your site? The answer is probably not.

Depending on the type of site you may want to generate an RSS feed for a page if:

1. It's the first page and you want a general feed for the site itself (new articles)
2. The page changes frequently i.e. an article page which has user generated comments
3. Sub categories within the site (like to first page but limited to articles in that sub category)

You could try using the <ttl> element in the feed to specify how long the feed can be cached before needing to be updated.