Prefetching Is a Bet You're Making on the Reader's Behalf
Date Published
The default behavior of prefetching every visible link is a reasonable one for most content sites: the pages are small, the odds of a given link being clicked are decent, and the win — a navigation that feels instantaneous — is worth the wasted bandwidth on the links that don't get clicked.
That default stops being reasonable on a page with dozens of links and limited bandwidth on the visitor's end, or where the linked pages are heavy enough that prefetching several at once genuinely competes with the current page's own loading.
This is exactly the kind of default a project's own conventions matter for — a custom link component that opts out of automatic prefetching by design, rather than one that silently inherits the framework's default, is a deliberate choice about where that bet gets made and where it doesn't.