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Google Web Accelerator

[quote]Web accellerators are mostly just a gimick for people who don't know anything about the internet and wouold just like to FEEL that they are going faster.[/quote]

[quote]Mmmm I have never seen a "web accelerator" do anything more then cache the web pages and unless your stuck on 56k I thinks its pretty pointless[/quote]

Apparently prefetching means nothing to you guys. Also, I usually cap my "cache" around 75 MB because browsers usually do the caching anyway. In this say and age, 500 MB isn't much of a hard drive hog. I throw around 2 GB files on a daily basis. That said, GWA is certainly flawed, but it's not a bad idea. The prefetching needs to work harder, and the cache is almost useless, but prefetching will almost always make your browsing experience faster. Unfortunately it's not intelligent enough to be too noticeable. If it always loads links from top to bottom, prefetching is somewhat weak. If Google logs the most common links you often click from a particular URL (say, you always view your profile from the youtube main page) it can learn and prefetch your most common actions. I could see prefetching becoming very powerful, but again people will always complain about privacy issues, security, etc. Not to mention the extra megabyte or two a text file of common URLs will take.

The only real concern I have with GWA at the moment is the YouTube (owned by Google no less) glitch. They either need to hotfix GWA to not accelerate YouTube content, or have it actually do the buffering itself instead of YouTube, or force YouTube to somehow skip the GWA proxy. Either way, they have yet to fix it, and it's the one problem I have against GWA.

To summarize: The concept of GWA isn't good (or bad) because it loads from your computer instead of the internet, relying on old data, it's good because it loads from the internet before you ask it, then from your computer when you do, relying on seconds-old data. In theory of course.

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