Turn off DNS pre-fetching in Google Chrome to fix page loading problems

I have occasionally experienced a problem in Google Chrome where it would simply not load some web pages, leaving them blank, white. Hitting Reload would not help. You needed to shutdown Chrome, run Microsoft Internet Explorer, and then restart Chrome to make the problem go away. That is too much of a pain.

The problem seems to be some bug in Chrome's network I/O stack.

There is another workaround... simply disable the DNS pre-fetching feature in Chrome.

I had refrained from doing that because the DNS pre-fetching feature is there explicitly to speed up loading of web pages, part of the main reason I was using Chrome.

But, today, I ran into the blank page problem so many times that I finally bit the bullet and turned the DNS pre-fetching feature off. That made the problem go away.

But guess what that did to page load performance?

No... it actually made it FASTER!!! Go figure.

In any case, here is what you do:

1. Bring up the Chrome "Tools" menu by clicking on the little wrench icon.
2. Click on the "Options" menu item.
3. Click on the "Under the Hood" Chrome Options tab.
4. Click on the "Use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance" check box. Make sure there is no little green checkmark in the box -- if there is, click it again to make the checkmark go away.
5. Click on the Close Button.
6. Click on the Reload icon (circular arrow), and PRESTO! the page should load promptly.

-- Jack Krupansky