if you go to chrome://chrome-urls/ and then down to net-internals, you can get a pretty transparent view of exactly what chrome is doing. plus there's a bunch of other stuff there too.
It appears that Chrome aggressively prefetches DNS results for most of the links in pages you visit too. It's quite strange to watch as DNS requested for hundreds of domains you haven't even intended to visit start flowing past. The first time I saw it I had to check that nothing unscrupulous was running on my computer...
