I've found out why I get requests to set cookies from sites I don't think I've visited. The reason is that I have visited the site, I just didn't know it!
It's a feature of Firefox that, as far as I can tell, only Google make use of. So, in the case of the previous example that I posted, the HTML returned from the Google search contains the following code:
link rel="prefetch" href="http://www.georgeproctor.co.uk/"
This tells Firefox to go and get the content from that URL as Google thinks that I am likely to actually want to visit that site. In most cases Google is wrong, but it makes Firefox go off and connect to that site anyway! If I'd let the handling of cookies to Firefox's default state then I'd have never noticed!
Seems to me that Firefox should default to not allowing prefetching. That way the user is more likely to know what is happening rather than unknowingly allowing cookies from sites that the user may not even be aware that they have visited.
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