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Google Web Accelerator
Lukey Boy writes "Google has released a free web accelerator product for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. According to their information page the software uses Google servers as a proxy for web content, delivering the pages to your system more rapidly and compressing them beforehand."
More information about GWA is posted here: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050504-1453 07
Also, browsers other than Firefox and Mozilla can take advantage of GWA if you set them to proxy requests over Localhost:9100 while GWA is running in the system tray. It should also be pointed out that this is apparently geared towards broadband users.
...a proxy which just compressed stuff on the server and then decompresses it on the client?
Oh... yes.
Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:
* Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
* Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
* Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
* Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
* Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
* Compressing data before sending it to your computer.
... But how does it know how many minutes you save...
I assume it would calculate your current download speed as well as the size of the information you're retrieving, then do the same based on going through Google's servers, and come up with an approximate value of saved time.
Something like that anyhow I think.
Hope be with ye,
Cyan
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Well, domains yes, specific pages, no. And they even let you turn off the autoupdater if you want. First time I've ever seen that from Google.
What I'd to know is how this helps a broadband connection but not dial-up. My connection already loads most pages nearly instantly.
Only on
Read the info page. You just have to point your proxy settings to localhost:9100.
Trolling is a art,
Nice troll. Inflamatory, and correct only by a tenuous strand of tortured logic. It was Union Carbide who gassed Bhopal, which didn't merge with Dow until 1999, a full fifteen years after the incident, and five years after Union Carbide sold its 51% interest in the Bhopal facility.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The Google toolbar only sends the URL of the page you're visiting back to Google, with a harmless google.com URL as the referrer. People would scream about privacy complaints otherwise. With this, the only information sent to Google is stuff that's necessary for the service to work. Fortunately for Google, that information happens to be important.
Yahoo and presumably Alexa do send referrer information if WebRank is enabled. I don't know what percentage of people turn off WebRank, but with Web Accelerator, there's no opting out if you use it.
Works with Wine:
:)
1) Install on a Windows box
2) Copy Program Files\Google\Web Accelerator files to linux box
3) "wine GoogleWebAccWarder.exe &"
4) Set your browser proxy to "localhost" port 9100
5) Surf with speed
If it fails, check your windows\temp directory for the google logs...
Note - this comment posted with Google Web Accelerator.
æeee!
You mean Googledot?
".. and there's no catch!"
Unfortunately, the catch is google now knows your surfing habits, and their's no privacy policy.
GWA works fine with Opera. If you notice on the info page, you can maually set Opera's proxy settings to use GWA, you just don't get the "x seconds saved" figure in the browser.
The GWA does three things that save bandwidth:
1) Compress all HTML content passed between Google and client
2) Use local cacheing
3) Send diffs (just what changed) of files that are in the cache but out of date.
I could refresh Slashdot over and over, and the only thing that I would have to download when the page changes is a compressed diff, probably a savings of at least an order of magnitude.
In the situation you describe though there are many computers using one connection. Since GWA interfaces with browsers via a simple HTTP proxy (The IE/Firefox integration is just for the "x seconds saved" display), you should be able to install GWA on one computer and set multiple other computers to use that proxy.
Of course Google might check to see if the machine making the request is on localhost.
I can't really see what google (or anyone for that matter) can really do to accelerate web content on broadband connections. [...] There is no good reason to sign up for this.
The reason you're skeptical is because you don't know as much about the Internet as google does.
When you download a web page on your 6Mbps cable modem, do you think it instanly goes to 6Mbps throughput, transfers the page, and then drops to zero? It doesn't. The efficiency *decreases* as your connection gets faster (which is why google does not claim to speed up slow connections - there's little room for improvement). Here's why:
The TCP stack under your browser starts by establishing a connection (3 way handshake). Then it sends a packet with the HTTP request. Finally after those long round trip times of basically doing nothing, your browser starts receiving HTML. As the HTML comes in, the process repeats for the embedded stuff (images). If you have a fast link (and especially if the server is far away), your link spends a lot of time doing nothing while connections are established and transactions take place.
By routing your connection through google, many efficiencies can be gained. These are listed in, of all places TFA. It's not just caching, either. Prefetching, for example, is a trick where their servers will start requesting and transferring the images within a web page, even before your browser has requested them. Since the HTML already went through google's proxy, they know what your browser is going to request before your browser does.
So instead of just pooh-poohing it because you don't understand the technology, why don't you go download a copy of Ethereal, which will let you see these tricks in action. Then you can offer us a more educated opinion based on empirical fact, instead of a long diatribe amounting to "I don't understand how it works, therefore it sucks".
Nice try, but Yahoo! Mail works perfectly through the Google Web Accelerator. Better even.
I think that it's just a firefox bug. The same thing happened to my 1.0.3 install. But it was about a week ago, before I had even heard about this new google program. I had to uninstall and then go and delete my profile before it would work again.
No privacy policy?
I clicked on the "Pricay Policy" link and saw this:
http://www.google.com/privacy.html
-- Brendan Hills
They say:
The problem is that this information, when correlated with information from web sites you're using such as user names, passwords, etc. (all of which would be routed through their proxy and caches except for https information which goes through the proxy but not the caches), can tell them, or anyone else who has access, exactly who you are, where you surf and what you do.Their privacy policies completely fail to address this issue.
Seriously, I'm not trolling: I've literally lost count of how many times I've written simple DHTML scripts that executed consistently in IE, Firefox, Netscape, Safari, even Omniweb -- only to discover that they caused Opera to absolutely shit itself executing the same code. I don't think it's exaggerating greatly to state that Opera is to DHTML roughly what Netscape 4 was to CSS: so bad that I've simply stopped even trying to support Opera with any but the most basic scripts.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Yes, you can blow right past your company's firewall/proxy! I usually cannot get to Azureus, but with Google Web Accelerator I can download to my hearts content.
:)
Hmmmm...I wonder how long it will take before my company recognizes that I am no longer opening connections to multiple sites...
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