I am trying to test prefetching on Firefox 3.6. I'm using:
<link rel="prefetch" href="hst_galaxy.jpg"/>
I don't see any requests in Firebug's Net panel. When I look at the Apache2 logs, I see only the page request, nothing after. I don't see the expected X-moz: prefetch header either. I have also inspected the packets using Wireshark and the prefetch header is not being sent. I also used LiveHttpHeaders(FF extension), and again the prefetch header isn't sent.
I checked out my about:config options and "network.prefetch-next" is enabled.
My test setup is on Mac OS 10.5.8. I am using the local installation of Apache, and running this from a test html file in the sites directory. I've tried 3 different domain options, http://localhost/cachetest, http://localhost.com/cachetest, and http://www.randomurl.com/cachetest. localhost.com and randomurl.com are domains I have configured in my /etc/hosts file. The test page is accessible.
I've visited this page which says the X-Moz header is detected. http://browserspy.dk/prefetch.php In Firefox, it says yes. In Chrome/Safari it says no, which is expected. Again, I cannot detect the X-Moz header being sent with Wireshark or LiveHttpHeaders. When looking at the source of that page, I do see the right kind of element though.
I'm really not sure what I'm missing. I've been pretty thorough with testing this and I don't see how this possibly is working if I detect nothing from Firefox and record nothing in Apache.
Does anyone have some enlightenment they can share?