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Posts Tagged ‘Firefox’

Back in the day, when 48kbps was scorching fast, we all needed a way to get our internets faster. I remember many a (un)happy hour fiddling about with various “internet accelerators”, caching proxies, and other bits’n'bobs.

It all came rapidly back to me this week as I tried out ‘mobile broadband’, via a Three USB modem. It’s exactly like dial-up, but faster!

It does sometimes drop the connection (especially during thunderstorms), and doesn’t seem anywhere near as reliable as a wired connection. But it’s still pretty impressive. Look ma, it’s tha intertubes with no wires!

So, in an effort to get a little more stability and speed from the dongle, I started looking at the web accelerators and proxies available today. AllegroSurf is still around – I remember that from when Win2K was in beta! Still looks the same, is still a solid app, still costs money. Well that rules that one out then! It does have useful features though – ad blocking and caching being amongst them.

The Google Web Accelerator was a bit of a no-go. It didn’t like my install of Firefox 3. Too bad – I do.

I half remembered something called “webalizer” or something like that – it had an interface a bit like Avast Antivirus, and did caching and prefetching – but it doesn’t seem to exist any more! Perhaps I’ve completely mis-remembered the name.

Best thing so far is a little Java app from toonel.net – it compresses data to and from toonel’s own web based proxy server. I’m averaging 40% compression both ways – sweet! Saves on the 5gb bandwidth allowance, and speeds up downloading too.

But still, does anyone know what happened to this ‘webalizer’ thing – or even what it was actually called?

I know I’m not the only one that has experienced RC3 (or RC2 for that matter) locking up for no obvious reason, and quite frankly it was annoying me to the point of switching to Opera (!). So it is great pleasure that I annouce…I might have a fix for it!!

It’s quite complex, but here goes:

Uninstall the Google toolbar.

No, that was it. Haven’t had a lock up in 36 hours since uninstalling the toolbar. Hope it works for you too!

Update : 64 hours and counting….