Mozilla Firefox prefetching rel = "next"

Question

Firefox seems to preload everything installed in the meta tag, for example:

<link rel="next" href="http://domain.com/page/2"> 

You can read more about this here: http://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Link_prefetching_FAQ

Now on my site, when there are several pages for things like comments that I used rel = "next" and rel = "previous", since I thought it was a good mark and could be used to help certain readers or search engines .

However, I also tried to keep track of which last comment the user read, but this does not work (one of those stupid times when you spent hours on something simple).

Basically, when a user, for example, reads page 2 of 3, I update the database to say that they read page 2, but not on page 3. However, since page 3 gets prefetched, the code for that page and SQL is executed updates the fire for this page even if the user has never read page 3.

So, I have a few quests:

• Is there a way to avoid this by keeping the “next” and “prev” marks? Or is it easier to just delete these meta tags?
• Are there any other forms of prefetching that I should be aware of and trying to deal with them?
• Is there a special way to find out if something is just a prefetch, like a special request header?

Answer 1

The answers to your question are in order:

• Sorting. I think you can throw out ?something at the ends of your URIs to make them non-electionable.
• Almost certainly. Chrome also performs various preloads, and the ?something trick may not work.
• Yes. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Link_prefetching_FAQ#As_a_server_admin.2C_can_I_distinguish_prefetch_requests_from_normal_requests.3F in the FAQ section.