Google Web Accelerator
Google Web Accelerator was launched a while ago, but was quickly withdrawn due to a high demand. Now it’s available for download again, so I’m giving it a try. It saved 38.2 seconds of my live in the past 10 minutes.
It won’t start increasing your browsing speed immediately after installing it, but in a longer period of time. It uses various techniques to make browsing faster, including caching, preloading pages, using the Google servers to fetch the data and compressing data. Here are the strategies as listed by Google:
Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
Compressing data before sending it to your computer.
There are a few bad things about these techniques, but most of the users will probably not be bothered by these.
I immediately noticed that Google Web Accelerator is using Google servers to retrieve data when browsing, since the browser now uses a proxy (http://localhost:9100/proxy.pac). If you visit www.whatismyip.com you will see that along with your normal IP a proxy will also be detected, which is located in Mountain View, California.
If I understand correctly, Google Web Accelerator is prefetching pages, meaning it preloads pages that you are likely to view, linked from the current page in your browser. And this means it will use your idle bandwidth, and there are still some ISPs who charge by traffic.
Overall, despite the mentioned disadvantages, Google Web Accelerator seems interesting, and I’ll keep using it until it proves useless (or I get a 10Mb connection).
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