Earlier this week Google released a Webaccelerator which works together with Firefox and Internet Explorer. It's a nifty little add-on which tries to download a cached version of the page your trying to download. The cached versions are stored on Google's server farm. The idea is that the page should be faster to download from Google than from the original site. To speed things up even more the cached copies are compressed when they are sent. I've used it since it was released and according the counter in the program I've saved about 20 minutes of surfing with it. It actually improves the speed quite a lot on some sites!
Until today. When I tried to launch my Firefox a couple of hours ago it wouldn't start. I tried many things like shutting down the webaccelerator. I chatted with some people on the #firefox channel who advised me to try all kinds of things. The only thing that helped in the end was uninstalling the webaccelerator. Too bad.
It seems that Google has some problems with its site at the moment. Some DNS flux or something. So that is probably why the webaccelerator isn't working. But I think it is a rather serious thing to completely stop my browser from working when Google has a DNS problem.
Well, I'm not complaining too much. First of all, the webaccelerator is a beta. Yes, I can hear you saying that Google is currently altering the meaning of that word with all its beta products up and running. But still, it's a beta.
There has also been a lot of complaints about the security risks of the webaccelerator. When visiting some site requiring logins some people have found themselves logged in as someone else. That's really serious! It seems that the guys at Google Labs have a lot to work on.
Well, I will be waiting for an upgrade of the webaccelerator. But once they release an improved version I will install it again. I'm happy to be a beta tester.
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