datasette #3046: Don’t serve link: rel=next HTTP headers to Firefox for HTML pages

Don't serve link: rel=next HTTP headers to Firefox for HTML pages. When examining the Firefox network panel, it was observed that requests to a Datasette table page triggered an HTTP prefetch to the subsequent page containing rows from that table. This behavior occurred due to Datasette pages serving an HTTP link header, such as "link: https://latest.datasette.io/fixtures/compound_three_primary_keys? _next=a,d,v ; rel= next".

This practice is problematic as only a small percentage of visitors to these pages will click the "next" link, leading to unnecessary data fetching and Datasette servers wasting resources rendering entire pages that are then discarded. Upon investigating, it was discovered that Firefox has a longstanding issue, dating back 24 years, concerning this behavior.

Interestingly, one of the original comments on that issue linked to a blog post from 2002 where the feature was already criticized. The author of the post, Simon Willison, made this revelation on November 7th, 2026, and encouraged readers to support them with a $10/month sponsorship for monthly digests of the most important LLM developments.