Back when Google released their Desktop Search beta, I “expressed my dissapointment”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000409.html about their failure to support alternatives to the dominant windows webbrowser. Happily, “they corrected this”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000449.html by the time they released the finished version.

They still don’t have a Mozilla/Firefox version of their toolbar.

Still, I find it notable that they have recently released a Mozilla/Firefox specific feature that should be a big boon to users. They are including markup in their search results that will cause Firefox to prefetch the referenced page so that it will appear quickly/instantly when the user clicks the link.

As a frequent searcher, I’m looking forward to this. I’m already using an extension to add thumbnail previews to search results so I can more quickly zero in on the best candidates.

bq. Google Information for Webmasters

bq. On some searches, Google uses a special link tag supported by Firefox and Mozilla to instruct the browser to download the top search result before the user clicks on the result. When the user clicks on the top result, the destination page will load faster than before. This tag is only inserted when it is likely that the user will click on the first link.