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This Tips & Tricks series, which incorporates regular software updates and reviews, is aimed at enhancing your broadband experience.
And we would like to hear from you as well. If you have a favourite utility for optimizing your broadband experience, email us at info@ida.gov.sg.
You can speed up your browsing experience by using a web accelerator. A web accelerator can be a proxy server used by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) to reduce web access times. It can also be a hardware appliance or a browser extension that you can install on your computer. In this article, we will look at simple, cost effective ways to speed up your browsing experience using free, installable browser extensions.
Web accelerators are tools that can help speed up the download of web content such as plain text, HTML, markup and java script, as well as common forms of graphics such as GIF, and JPEG images, Flash and file downloads. They do not accelerate other forms of Internet content such as video and audio streams (To find out how you can accelerate streaming media, click here)
Two popular web accelerators are FasterFox for Firefox and the Google Web Accelerator.
FasterFox is a Mozilla Firefox extension that tweaks network connections and caches web pages so that the pages can be loaded more quickly.
Whenever you request for a web site, your ISP's computer will work out the Internet address of the web site and go to the relevant web server to download the requested file. Web accelerators can help speed up this process in several ways:
- Tweaking the network. FasterFox allows you to tweak many network settings such as the number of simultaneous connections to the server.
- Caching. The web accelerator stores frequently or recently accessed web sites in the cache memory on your computer. When you type in the address of the web site you want, the web accelerator will load the file from the cache instead of going to the web server, reducing the time needed for you to access the site.
- Pre-fetching: Web accelerators like FasterFox for Firefox have a pre-fetch mechanism that makes use of idle bandwidth to load and cache all the links on the page you are browsing so that these linked sites can be downloaded faster when requested.
- Compressing documents. Web accelerators may compress documents to a smaller size or send only what has been changed since the document was last requested. They may also filter out ads or other unwanted content so that the web site can be loaded more quickly. For example, FasterFox for Firefox includes a popup blocker for popups initiated by Flash plug-ins.
To demonstrate the use of a web accelerator, we accessed a random selection of 10 popular US web sites using a generic web browser and using Firefox 2 with FasterFox. The web sites covered News, Games, Movies and Online Shopping.
The web sites were accessed using a 10Mbps broadband connection and the download speeds were recorded. A total of 500 readings were taken and the average speeds are summarised in the table below.
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movies.yahoo.com
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15.4
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10.6
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www.bloomberg.com
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38.9
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26.7
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www.ebay.com
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9.1
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6.3
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www.foxmovies.com
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10.1
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6.9
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www.foxnews.com
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43.4
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29.8
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www.gamespot.com
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26.2
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18.0
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www.ign.com
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23.8
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16.4
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www.myspace.com
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10.2
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7.0
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www.sonypictures.com
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14.2
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9.7
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www.washingtonpost.com
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24.2
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16.6
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Average
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21.6
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14.8
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* Your actual performance may vary.
We found that the average download speed using Firefox 2 with the FasterFox add-on was 46% faster than the speed achieved using a generic browser.
Here's the link to Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Here's the link to the Fasterfox add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1269
Network performance enhancement with Windows Vista.
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