Google Chrome + Privoxy = no DNS prefetching

Given the number of people using Privoxy with Google Chrome for adblocking, I thought I'd post this.

DNS prefetching is one of the mechanisms used by Chrome to speed up browsing. Unfortunately, using a proxy destroys this feature, and apparently Privoxy does this as well. Chrome provides an about:dns page that allows the user to track the benefits of DNS prefetching, which was how I found out this problem: about:dns repeatedly reported zero gains when network traffic was routed through Privoxy. I disabled the action/filter files one by one, thinking that perhaps one of them was the problem, but the situation persisted even when they were all turned off.

Some may think adblocking is more important than the few milliseconds worth of benefit provided by DNS prefetching, but for those of us who want the best of both worlds, options seem rather limited right now. Yesterday night I experimented with hosts files; to my surprise, the one provided by MVPS gave rather good results. The surprise was because I previously thought hosts files were an outdated preventive technology, but it seems that at least MVPS' version is still doing fairly well. I've replaced Privoxy with it, combined with AdSweep for element hiding.

If anyone knows any alternative approaches, or of any adblock software that doesn't interfere with Chrome's features, please share. Thanks.

 

Try it with fastcache from analogX...

http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/fc/download.htm

works beautiful with the Opera and Privoxy combo.
And does save time for repeated domain name lookups.