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
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!)