Oops! This link appears to be broken in Google Chrome

You are trying to open a web page in Chrome and all it gives you is this error message - “DNS Error – cannot find server.”

You hit F5 to refresh a page but the error persists. You then open an alternate browser, like Firefox or IE, and the website loads up without any problem. So its a Chrome specific issue and has nothing to do with  DNS Servers or your Internet connection.

The support page on the Chrome website suggests that you clear your browser cache, delete the cookies and scan your computer for malicious software to fix the issue.

Well, that may not fix your problem because the issue is not “malware” but a built-in Chrome setting that’s possibly preventing certain websites from opening up in Chrome.

When you visit a webpage (like a search results page), Google Chrome will pre-fetch the IP addresses of all websites that are listed on that page. Since the browser has the IP addresses of all the links in advance,  DNS pre-fetching ensures that any links that may you click on that webpage will load faster. However, when pre-fetching fails, something that’s not very uncommon, you may get the “link broken” error.

You are more likely to see such an error when you are trying to open a website that you have never visited before.

The fix is simple -  go to  Tools > Options  (or  Preferences  on a Mac) >  Under the Hood  and uncheck the setting that says “Use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance.” This might increase the loading time of certain pages by a few microseconds but you won’t at least see that misleading error message.

Related: When you cannot open a specific website