Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

10 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Already Covered on /. by grantdh · · Score: 5, Informative

    What, weren't the responses given the last time this was posted enough???

    Damn, even I remember this one and I'm notorious for my short term memory loss. Who was smoking what when this one got posted? :)

    --

    I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
    1. Re:Already Covered on /. by jsse · · Score: 5, Funny

      Calm down, I see the differences:

      1) This is posted by Cliff, last time it was posted by Hemos. Isn't it a pity when those who blocked Cliff's or Hemos missed this great news? The news will be reposted by Taco very soon, so he majority who blocked both Cliff and Hemos will not miss it
      2) Last time we don't have typo in the headline. This is very untolerable for slashdot readers
      3) This time we've same article from other source. Slashdot editors must make sure they don't miss any reference to great news like that
      4) Last time Hemos said 'Quadruples Surfing Speed', today Cliff found out that it can actually boost the speed up to 500% percent! This is definitely an improvement and should be posted as a follow-up

  2. It's so fast... by Hubert_Shrump · · Score: 5, Funny

    It warps time, and reports itself again!

    --
    Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
  3. Hey Cliff by presearch · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hey Cliff.
    You oughta, like, read Slashdot more often.

  4. How is it possible to be so fast? by Pyromage · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not.

    No, I haven't used it. But there are simple facts, like the speed of light. The thing is this: data can only be transferred so fast.

    If I have a 56k connection, than the fastest I can transfer is 56k (I know there are other considerations, but that's not important). It's that simple.

    There are some things that can be done to speed it up: cache things. Render things faster, but they are all stopgap measures. I don't care what it says, the fact is that you only get so much speed. Any more just is not there.

    It's like saying my car gets infinite miles per gallon. I can improve things, but I still need some fuel no matter what I do.

  5. /. & vacations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Nice to know that I'd be able to go on vacation, come back to /. and see everything I missed reposted.

  6. 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
  7. It's easy making it faster by skinfitz · · Score: 3, Funny

    All you do is supply a cached copy of the entire web with the browser, then when on a dialup, all it does it look at the site URL and serve the page up from the cache.

    Easy!

  8. 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.