Google Web Accelerator

UPDATE: A mem­ber of Neowin.net had just found a major secu­rity issue in Google’s Web Accel­er­a­tor. Google’s Web Accel­er­a­tor had allowed him to login Neowin’s forums as other users on the board. This is a BIG issue when you actu­ally get to post around, mess stuff up and pos­si­bly find out pri­vate info­ma­tion of that user (say, if you have the men­tal­ity of a 12-year-old). I won­der if any­one had access to my accounts (not only Neowin, prob­a­bly Google has cached my logins to other forums or emails or even my Word­Press login)

I myself had un-installed GWA the very day I installed it. After all, I didnt expe­ri­ence any so-called speed-boost (I’m aware that this BETA only works for north amer­ica and europe) and also after those news about pri­vacy con­cerns of the pro­gram started pop­ping up on var­i­ous blogs and news sources.

I cer­tainly do not rec­om­mend you to down­load it. But if you insist, all i can say is, use it at your own risk.

Links: Block­ing GWA | Neowin dis­cus­sion

From GWA’s web­site: If you enter per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion (such as an email address) onto a form on an unen­crypted web page, some sites may send this infor­ma­tion through Google. When­ever your com­puter sends cook­ies with brows­ing or prefetch­ing page requests for unen­crypted sites, we tem­porar­ily cache these cook­ies in order to improve performance

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Google Web Accel­er­a­tor is an appli­ca­tion that uses the power of Google’s global com­puter net­work to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accel­er­a­tor is easy to use; all you have to do is down­load and install it, and from then on many web pages will auto­mat­i­cally load faster than before.

Please note that Google Web Accel­er­a­tor is cur­rently in beta test mode.

Also note that dur­ing the first part of our beta test­ing period, users out­side of North Amer­ica and Europe may not see much improve­ment in their web page load­ing speed.

Found out this when I checked Google Labs today. Google claims that its ‘accel­er­a­tor’ speeds up brows­ing and supris­ingly, Fire­fox is sup­ported. So I thought, why not give it a try? I down­loaded the 1.4MB file and installed it. It places a tool­bar in Fire­fox show­ing a counter which now shows “0.0 sec­onds saved”

After some brows­ing around, I couldnt notice any dif­fer­ence in the speed. A sec­ond check on Google’s web­site gave me my answer: ‘users out­side of North Amer­ica and Europe may not see much improve­ment in their web page load­ing speed.’ as I bolded up there. Too bad. So lets just wait for ‘the sec­ond part’ of their beta test­ing period. Hope­fully it helps.

So with­out fur­ther ado: (down­load at your own risk!)

webaccelerator.google.com

Sys­tem Require­ments
Oper­at­ing Sys­tem: Win XP or Win 2000 SP3+
Browser: IE 5.5+ or Fire­fox 1.0+
Avail­abil­ity: For users in North Amer­ica and Europe (dur­ing beta test­ing phase)