Google Web Accelerator

[Dragoon Knight]

Not sure if anyone's seen this yet, I just noticed it today myself.  Google Web Accelerator is a new browser plugin (works with Internet Explorer 5.5+ or Firefox 1.0+) that - basically - speeds up your browsing.

It does this by essentially pre-fetching web pages before you go to them, acting like a pro-active cache.  It also routes page requests through Google's servers for faster access, and comes with a handy little interface in your toolbar telling you approximately how much time you've saved by using it. :)

Check it out for yourselves; I suck at describing things like this.  I'm just testing it out, myself, but even after only a few minutes usage, pages seem to be loading quite a bit quicker.  30.8 seconds saved so far. :P

[Andrew]

Sounds similiar to Fasterfox extension for firefox. We had a discussion on it in the Firefox thread near middle of page.

[Kiyouta]

30.8 seconds saved so far. :P

And a whole lot of bandwidth wasted too. Google routes requests thru its servers huh? There goes privacy. There have been many of these web accelerator things, most of which contain spyware (this being a notable exception perhaps). I just see them as greedy and unnecessary. :(

[Andrew]

Think of all the processing power required to be contantly downloading data you might not even look at. Think of all the porn/viruses/spyware downloaded in the background! :)