Safari prefetch? many Little Snitch alerts

How can i turn this off?

Uninstall "Little Snitch".

I doubt that anyone here can give you a definitive answer as to what Safari's doing in the background. Have you got iCloud sharing turned on for Safari? This could be a new functionality that uses MacOS to "vet" your bookmarks prior to sharing them with iOS, making sure they don't link out to malware sites. It might be a new feature of Siri/AI updating itself on your preferences, style, or whatever so maybe turn Siri off for Safari and see if that makes a difference.

Either remove Little Snitch and test again, or contact Little Snitch support for assistance with all issues or errors or diagnostics that might arise here in Little Snitch, in other apps, or in macOS, pending app removal.

Little Snitch is an immensely powerful tool, can be used to derail or destabilize or disrupt apps and macOS itself, uses undocumented and unsupported mechanisms to access undocumented macOS and app internals, and is an app with side-effects and repercussions that only Little Snitch support can assist with.

For enhancement requests or problem reports for, or questions about Little Snitch app itself, again, contact Little Snitch support.

I don't know why you'd set LS up to block a browser by default; aside from the annoyance, it could cause you more problems than it might ever prevent. Most mainstream browsers these days have protections to detect harmful sites or whatever it is you're concerned might happen. However, if you're going to do it then your best bet is to get a better browser and one which you can control prefetch settings - assuming it really is prefetch. FF is free, better than Safari IMO and gives you some control over prefetch in the about:config settings, but you still need to know what you're doing. Browsers do lots of stuff in the background in terms of updating block lists, malware sites, etc., and if you block those then you'll disable any protections they offer.

Before you do anything you could try just leaving it alone for a while to make sure this isn't a one-off housekeeping exercise after the update.

Edit: just thought - if it's going through old bookmarks then hasn't LS already got rules for them or have you only recently installed LS?

"Little Snitch" may have served a useful purpose at one time, but that was at least two decades ago. Since then macOS became entirely too dependent on constant network connectivity (starting with iTunes, of all things — it later became apparent it was preparing for what became the Music app) and LS's commensurately constant nags became intolerable.

All other network connections from macOS and apps alike have only increased exponentially. The time to put the Snitch down passed a while ago.

AI suggests making a new profile, but i actually could not locate profiles in the OS! Why are they hidden?

"AI" could not find an answer to that? Shocking.

Use profiles in Safari on Mac - Apple Support

I doubt it will help though. Shocking, again.

quaagy wrote:

I believe i have found the solution. It is a 'Feature Flag'.

'Service Worker Navigation Preload', or 'Link rel=preconnect via HTTP early hints' - these are the two likeliest.

Also shut off now: 'Notifications', and 'Load Web Archives with ephemeral storage'.

One of these was going out and hitting every bookmark. Now it has stopped.

If i can figure out which one, i will post again.

And what was this effort worth? Like too many reports form too many add-on security apps, nothing.

John Galt wrote:

"Little Snitch" may have served a useful purpose at one time, but that was at least two decades ago. Since then macOS became entirely too dependent on constant network connectivity (starting with iTunes, of all things — it later became apparent it was preparing for what became the Music app) and LS's commensurately constant nags became intolerable.

All other network connections from macOS and apps alike have only increased exponentially. The time to put the Snitch down passed a while ago.

Other opinions are available. You can stop the nags by setting rules to either stop or allow the comms and I can't remember the last time I had a pop-up from LS. It saved my printer because if I hadn't blocked its app from its update server it would have auto-updated and prevented me from using generic cartridges. It's also handy for blocking annoyances like Apple news, Apple weather, Apple maps and all those other things that pop up in Apple apps which Apple seems to think are helpful but annoy the heck out of me.

But it's main use for me is to keep an eye on Apps and what they're doing on the web. A quick check of the current rules shows that at some point I've had to block Carbon Copy Cloner from contacting Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.