Why does FireFox send a request automatically to the first result in Google?

Question

In FireFox 3.6.1 (a fresh install), I am seeing a request sent to the first search result (Google) without user interaction.

Why is this?

Answer 1

Some browsers are set up to preload some links in a page, in order to minimize perceived delays. Google actually supports this. For example, When i google for "blah", the first result includes this code:

<link rel=prefetch href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blah"&gt;

A browser that supports this "microformat", or has a plugin installed that does, might load the page before it's requested, assuming (quite correctly, in many cases) that a user will click on the first search result they see.