Google Web Accelerator
Google has released a beta of the Google Web Accelerator for Firefox and Internet Explorer (Windows only) which is designed to Make Things Go Faster. It uses Google's many data centres to cache web content, prefetch content to your PC (a little like Firefox can), compress data, send only updated parts of pages when possible and then present you with a cute "Google saved you 15 minutes of your life this week" counter in your browser. :)
There's an FAQ for how it works, privacy and security questions, how to turn it off for certain sites.
posted by Des @ 10:24 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Hi Des, John M (HOS) here. There's a bit of debate on boards.ie about this (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=252692) - some people reckon the effect of the web accelerator would be to accidently disclose private info to others. Are they talking through their asses?
I've seen a couple of reports of this, mainly of bulletin board issues (where the cached page returned is someone else's version). Looks like beta means beta right now if they're right.
It certainly seems to be popular enough that you can't download it any more:
Thank you for your
interest in Google Web Accelerator.
We have currently reached our
maximum capacity of users and
are actively working to increase
the number of users we can support.
There seems to be a second issue being reported: as the accelerator has your cookie, etc. and is logged in as you, it can prefetch links that say "Delete me" without distinction apparently! Here's that story:
http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/google_web_accelerator_hey_not_so_fast_an_alert_for_web_app_designers.php
Slashdot has a couple of the usual daily Google threads on these issues too:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/07/1932224&tid=217&tid=172&tid=95
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/06/1717203&tid=217&tid=95&tid=158&tid=1
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