Google Web Accelerator is an interesting little thing. It plugs into your browser (mainly
IE and
Firefox, but can also
work with others) and attempts to speed up page load times. It reminds me of
OnSpeed, but is quite different.
< It uses compression like OnSpeed, but also uses other methods. It uses more efficent
caching, and only downloads pieces of webpage that have changed on frequently updated sites such as
blogs. Web Accelerator prefetches pages recommended by the page author,
using <link> tags. We'll definitely be using this functionality on our new design; it starts downloading certain pages while you are reading the current one, so when you click a link to a prefetched page, it will be loaded instantly. It won't do anything to secure pages, probably so people don't get
stressed about privacy as much as they did with
Gmail. It also won't work on dial-up, but it's only one person in the world left on dial-up (me) so nobody else will care. Find out more about the functionality by reading
the FAQ. When I visited the site the toolbar was unavailable for download, but I'm sure they'll accept more testers soon.
