Google's Web Accelerator

[barnettgs]

http://webaccelerator.google.com/

Wow, it made a big difference to loading pages like OCUK. Pages just comes up almost instantly!

Time saved meter showed around 6 seconds saved for this forum, on my 1mb broadband.

Works on Firefox and IE 5.5+.

After installed it, I started playing it and did not see any difference going back to same page again and again but few minutes later, it has improved greatly.

It made me wonder what's the use is firefox/IE cache if they can't do the same job as Google's Web Accelerator?

 

[FishThrower]

afaik all web accelrators just download the links on the current web page, so its cached on the hardrive before you click them

Thats how they used to work years ago, not sure now,

pretty dangerous and stupid if you use that at work as your internet usage will shoot right up on the proxy

 

[Al Vallario]

It made me wonder what's the use is firefox/IE cache if they can't do the same job as Google's Web Accelerator?

Google Web Accelerator uses a number of techniques, including cacheing on their side (much as Virgin Media do with local proxies), cacheing on your side, prefetching links (downloading linked pages on websites without your knowledge), downloading only changed content when you reload a cached webpage, and passing all your data through their systems, compressing it before it reaches you.

It's all rather pointless for a saving of a few seconds. I waste more than that being distracted by shiny things whilst using my computer, and that way I don't have to deal with all the risks associated with throwing all of my information through Google's systems and not knowing whether a page I'm visiting has been remotely cached or not.