Wednesday, May 04, 2005 10:11 PM
I need to just add a Google category! I must admit, I'm almost always enamoured by their offerings, and generally a bit surprised as well. Tonight, an entry in their blog mentioned that they have now released the Google Web Accelerator, into their typical beta status. I went to the page and expected to be disappointed. I figured that, like the Google Toolbar, it would only be available to IE users. Since I'm mostly on Firefox now I'd be left out. How pleasantly surprised I was to see an installed for IE and Firefox! It installs in both places and looks very much at home in either place.
They implemented it as a local proxy server. The installation occurs as an MSI to load the actual proxy server, then the browser extension manages preferences and the actual proxying. Browser preferences actually show no proxy setup, so it's obviously intercepting in a more sneaky manner! You tell it connection speed, sites not to accelerate (HTTPS and FTP aren't anyway), prefetching, and cache management. I like the prefetch feature. It will read ahead on certain pages and load the content locally. It does this using its own cache so beware that the size is in addition to your browser's cache. It works well though. It even tells you how much time you've saved by running it! I'm up to 6.5 seconds so far. We'll see how far I can push that it in a few days!
Interestingly, it is specifically optimized for broadband. I've seen plenty of "download accelerators" in the past that all just do some amount of compression for modem users, but this combines compression with prefetch and edge caching (Google's own servers) and should work really well. I'll just have to see how much of a difference I see in a few days. Will it do much on frequently changing content like blogs? Is it niche enough to help developers with articles and MSDN entries? I aim to find out!