There were at least two browser extensions which also discovered that poor design was widespread and to disable prefetching for similar reasons:

http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/index.html

https://signalvnoise.com/archives2/google_web_accelerator_he...

I think the state of the web has improved slightly over the last decade but this is a great example of why browser vendors are so conservative. You can do this now but only opt-in.