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An Even Faster Browser?

Posted by Cliff on from the living-up-to-the-hype dept.

octavian755 asks: "Seems that a 16-year-old Irish student has created an Internet browser called XWEB, which is the fastest browser known to date. This browser is said to be capable of boosting surfing speeds on a dial-up connection by 100 to 500 percent. What I would like to know is something like this even possible?" Update: 01/20 07:30 GMT by C : As folks have pointed out, this story is a duplicate. Also, a minor title gaffe corrected. Sorry about that.

4 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. I'm really impressed here.. by zcat_NZ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No technical details, not even an 'open' demo so we can see it's not rigged.

    The usual excuse; this is such advanced, groundbreaking stuff and he doesn't want anyone to steal his ideas until after he's been given some development capital.

    Scam. Scam. Scam...

    --
    455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
  2. The easy explaination... by OneFix · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Turn off HTTP 1.1 in IE's settings and it won't be able to use compression (Mod_GZIP, etc)...

    The other explaination is to modify Mod_GZIP or similar on the server side to report as some odd name (Mod_XWEBS might be a nice one) :) So that only your client recognises the compression method...this is real easy with Mozilla...and that or something similar is likely to be the real client. Mod_GZIP alone can give up to 12x the speed on a purely text page.

    The other features (Built-In TTS, Access to multiple search engines, etc) are all fairly standard in the browser market now.

    Now, I don't think it's been said enough...this kid supposedly did 1.5 million lines of code in 2 years...

    Which would be ~2054 lines of code per day... or 85 lines of code an hour...

    If we assume that he needs a minimum of 6 hours of sleep per night, that brings it to ~115 lines of code per hour...

    This doesn't allow for eating, testing, rewrites, attending classes, reading documentation, etc...

    Now, even the best coders only do ~100 lines of code per day...

    I refuse to belive that this kid could do the work of 20 coders over a 2 year period...

    You'ld think that this kid would release a binary only distribution for testing so that everyone would stop doubting his sincerity.

    1. Re:The easy explaination... by stevey · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Now, even the best coders only do ~100 lines of code per day...

      That's not true; some coders may write 500, some may write 50, and others may write only five.

      I'm not even that sure it is worth measuring the lines of code written as a performance indicator either; I've had days at work where I've written only one line of code - but it was the line to solve a random threading deadlock; and so it was the correct line to write.

    2. Re:The easy explaination... by stevey · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Creating IDL definitions, and wrappers for libraries is large in terms of LOC even if it's short in complexity - just to give one example. (I once worked on an CORBA based distributed reporting project)

      Other projects written in Java or C++ with lots of comments, and interfaces would be doable - it really depends upon the implementation language the level of the coding, and the individual developer.