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May 07, 2005
Web Acceleration: Part 2
So I said that I would report back on the new Google Web Accelerator and here are my experiences. I haven't really noticed a difference. The browser I use most often says that over the last couple of days I've saved a total of 18.9 seconds. Call me crazy, but I thought the savings would be much greater and I would notice a marked improvement in page load time. It's just not there. Plus, there are many complaints about it, some are privacy fears [zdnet.co.uk] and others are legitimate complaints about it's interaction with web apps [37signals.com].
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I like and am biased towards Google [google.com] because of the great things that they hae done, but I had a problem with the second article from 37Signals. I understand that blindly pre-fetching links while ignoring javascript alerts could potentially be dangerous but come on, why would you design a site that deletes something just by loading a page? I think that what happens is that they have a delete link that calls a verify function that allows or disallows the page transition to occur. I just think that you should use a function to write the destination URL into the page's href or use an asynchronous method like an XmlHttpRequest.
Either way, I think that in theory the web accelerator is a great idea, but it's implementation needs to be tweeked. Keep in mind it's just beta right now so I'm holding out hope.
Posted by Guy at May 7, 2005 01:21 PM