An Even Faster Browser?

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.

Comments

Re:How is it possible to be so fast?

[babbage]

Come on, be nice :)

Let's profile this rather than just flame. The article claims a 100% or greater speedup, which is of course twice as fast. If the download time is half of that, and as you say it cannot be shurnk further, then you can still realize a 100% gain by getting the other half of the work to approach zero time.

Very fast rendering (but very broken? I don't see anything saying this browser is actually usable or at all standards compliant...) is pretty much the main way to bring down that chunk of time. Good caching can minimize the amount of data transferred, and as another commenter noted, if the browser can take advantage of mod_gzip they'll get a significant download reduction on many sites.

Stopgaps? Sure, but no one is saying that things will be infinitely fast. Have you actually spent any time profiling what portion of the time is spent on which tasks in getting & displaying a web page? If the average downloading time is 50% or more then okay, your flame scorched the right target. But if other factors can accumulatively account for 50 or 80 percent of the work time, then your objections become just one of several relevant bottlenecks.

The thing is, whether or not you have ever used software profiling tools, I'm sure that the developers of the major browsers all have. That's what makes me skeptical of this. If there are any major gains to be made in download compression, caching, rendering or other areas, I would think that optimizations from each area would have shown up in the mainstream browsers by now (and in fact, all of this does exist in some form). While there is still room for improvement -- as the release of Safari clearly shows to the MSIE team -- extravagant claims are unlikely to be true.

I skipped out this article the last time it was posted, so may be asking what is a FAQ by now, but can anyone provide a better source of material on this browser than Rupert Murdoch's little puff piece? It would be interesting to hear how this browser supposedly works, against which browsers it supposedly does so much better, and whether those gains hold true as you adjust variables like bandwidth (does the gain wash out at DSL or T1 speeds?) and processing power (does the gain get even better on a very fast computer?). It would be interesting to see which browsers it was benchmarked against, and if there was any obvious problems with them when the tests, if any, were conducted ("what, I shouldn't be running against mod_inflate_data on that side?" :).