Google Web Accelerator

Google Web Accelerator - [via Google Blog]

Google have just released a web accelerator. A way to speed up your web browsing. As normal with Google it's in beta but it sounds quite full featured.

Wearing my cynical hat I would argue that it's just a way for Google to track how people browse the web and what they are looking for. It's another step in their bid to control our lives. However they have released a Firefox version so it was inevitable that I would try it.

During the installation my suspicions were confirmed when I had to check a box that says

I have read the above text and I understand that personally identifiable information about me may be sent to Google while using the Google Web Accelerator

I'm sure Google aren't really out to shaft us and it's nice to see that they openly admit that what they are doing isn't 100% secure, but it's still slightly worrying that they had to add this in the first place.

The accelerator works much like all the other web accelerators around the place. Basically it 'guesses' what you will look at next and starts downloading (caching) things so that when you actually visit the pages it loads quicker.

In both Firefox and Internet Explorer you get a little clock appear on your toolbar telling how much time you have saved. In the half an hour since installing the plug-in I have saved 2.1 seconds.

I'm not sure how useful this will be for me since I tend to open lots of browser windows (well... tabs) at a time and load things whilst I read other things essentially doing what the accelerator does. It'll be interesting to see if it does save me any time.

Update : Well - it lasted about 2 hours before I unistalled it. In that time I apparently saved myself 20 seconds by using it. I had to uninstal it for technical reasons unrelated to the actual Accelerator. Maybe I'll try it again in the future for now it's gone.

Update 2 : Apparently the pre fetching of the pages can perform actions you don't want it to which can have very bad results. Read more at the 37 signal blog. The jist of the problem is that because you install a programme it sees everything your web browser sees, including pages inside password protected areas. An example of something it may do is accidentally trigger actions such as deleting an email whilst logged into hotmail.