Certain Chromium-based browsers, including Chrome and Edge, enable page preloading, or link fetching, by default. This means that when you perform a web search, your browser automatically preloads some of the top search results in the background before you click on anything. While this feature attempts to make your online browsing and searching speed faster, it also leaves you vulnerable to online threats. Preloaded websites can set, read, and send cookies to third parties as if you had visited the site, even if you never did.
How this affects you
Your privacy is potentially at risk if you run any web searches with page preloading turned on. We recommend following the instructions below to turn page preloading off and keep your online browsing safe.
Unexpected Browser Guard block page on Chrome browsers
When performing a web search on Chrome with page preloading enabled, a Browser Guard block page notification may sometimes appear before you click on any search results. This is not a false positive, but a result of Chrome preloading potentially malicious search results pages in the background.
Turn off page preloading
We recommend turning off page preloading in your browser settings to protect your browsing privacy and to stop seeing unexpected block pages when searching the web. If you don't want to turn off page preloading but don't want to see block pages on Chrome, you can try using a different browser and repeating your search.
To turn off page preloading in Chrome:
- In your browser search bar, enter: chrome://settings
- In the left side bar, click Performance.
- Scroll down to Speed, then toggle Preload pages off.
To turn off page preloading in Edge:
- In your browser search bar, enter: edge://settings
- In the left side bar, click Privacy, search, and services.
- Click Cookies.
- Toggle Preload pages for faster browsing and searching off.