Can I turn off Google Chrome's new prerendering?

To turn off prerendering completely, disable the following:

• Predict network actions to improve page load performance

  chrome://settings/advanced

  

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• Prerender from omnibox

  chrome://flags/

  

Yes, you can. The google developer whitepaper on prerendering, in the "Debugging prerendering" section, says:

You also have the option of disabling the Chrome 17+ feature that can initiate prerendering based on user interaction with the address bar. To disable this type of prerendering, start Chrome with a command-line flag of --prerender-from-omnibox=disabled.

Read the whole section/whitepaper. It's full of good stuff.