If you’re at all like me, you forsake Internet Explorer long ago and switched to Mozilla Firefox, but eventually got fed up with the constant updates and bloating.

So you switched to Google Chrome, which is lightning fast. Unbelievably fast. Kenyan marathoner fast.

That is, it’s fast when it works, so long as you’re connected to a fast dedicated line. Such was the case for me at work with my laptop, but I bring it home connect to the ethernet and I get bunches of “This web page is not available” errors, and have to constantly refresh pages to get them to load. My wife, connected through wifi, had even more problems loading pages.

At first we blamed our aging wireless router. Then I realized that it wasn’t a problem in IE or Firefox (which I still use to test web apps cross-browsers). It was a Chrome-specific behavior. It would try to load a page and if the Internet tubes showed the slightest clogging the browser would just stop trying.

So I looked “Under the Hood” and found the benign-sounding option to “use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance” enabled. I unclicked that sucker and the Internets are blazing fast once again.