Google Chrome sending background requests without me visiting the page

18
2013-11
  • r_honey

    I today noticed a strange Google Chrome behaviour. In the last few days, I visited one particular site let's say example.com very often (work related site). The site is SSL enabled and visiting example.com redirects me to https://www.example.com.

    I was developing and debugging on localhost today and had Fiddler opened. I suddenly noticed request to example.com in Fiddler which redirected to https://www.example.com, followed by a series of HTTPS Tunnel requests to www.example.com (I did not had decrypt HTTPS traffic option enabled in Fiddler, so only got TUNNEL requests without underlying page url).

    I noticed the User-Agent header for these reqeusts and they were originating from Chrome. But I did not open example.com site anywhere in the last hour in Chrome. I checked Chrome's history and yes, I did not open that site recently.

    Is this expected Google Chrome behavior (some sort of pre-fetching). My version is 19.0.1084.56. My computer is not infected as it's a hardened with a series of measures and the activity itself does not look suspicious.

    • Answers
  • Stephanie

    Yes, this is expected behavior for Chrome and was apparently added earlier this year. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2145148/google-touts-website-prefetching-chrome


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  • Prashant

    I want to display more Most Visited pages in google chrome, currently only 9 pages are being displayed, how can I increase them to 12 or 20 ??


    • Related Answers
  • Dave Webb

    The Dev Channel build of Chrome does offer a more customisable New Tab Page but this doesn't allow you to change the number of thumbnails.

    So I don't think you can change the number of pages you see.

  • MK_Dev

    In case someone is still looking for this functionality, you can use Speed Dial extension for Chrome. However, I have not yet found a way to use the most visited websites automatically.

    https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dgpdioedihjhncjafcpgbbjdpbbkikmi

  • drfrogsplat

    There may be a way to do this by writing an extension (I have not seen any yet though).

    There's a topSites API that gives access to the Titles and URLs of the "Most Visited" pages (I think currently only 20 are tracked).

    The thumbnails may be available via chrome://thumb/URL. I'm not sure if you can actually access the thumbs from extensions though.