mrMister - 7:32 pm on May 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

The rest of the web is still stuck in the uncompressed dark ages of the 70's.

That's one hell of a generalization. More and more server owners are waking up to the benefits of HTTP compression. As the price of dedicated servers freefalls and shared servers become less common, webmasters are now able to take compression in to their own hands rather than letting greedy Web Hosts send uncompressed data to artificially increase bandwidth usage (and therefore profits)

One thing we know for absolute certainty is that bandwidth requirements and page sizes are going to increase.

Your definition of absolute is very different to mine!

Bandwidth requirements probably will go up barring any radical new inventions. File sharing has already taken off to a large extent and multimedia streaming is set to take off in a big way too.

However the Web Accellerator doesn't do a think about high bandwidth usages of the Internet. It deals with web pages.

I see a downward trend in web page file sizes.

My oldest site is 10 years old. Thanks to the widespread adaption of CSS, external javascript and browsers that support HTTP compression, I've been able to decrease my average web page on that site from about 10KB down to 1.5KB.

Slowly, more and more web site owners are taking the time out to make their code leaner and faster.

A compressing proxy does indeed stand to speed up the web.

Possibly so. But this utility wastes far more data through prefetches than it saves in compression. Widespread use of the utility will slow down the Internet as a whole.

I agree in principle with claus's feelings on the product, but I disagree on some of the specifics: > a made up consumer need

I agree with claus too and your statements regarding compression. However I will make my point again that compression is one small part of this application. Another part is prefetching and that alone wastes all the bandwidth savings that the compression saves.

> it does not honor robots.txt It is a proxy on behalf of a human, it isn't a bot.

The proxy is a proxy. the client application you download is a prefetching agent which makes it a bot. It accesses resources without knowing what they are. I have seen it add items to shopping baskets of its own accord even when robots.txt specifically forbids automated user agents from doing such.

> User-Agent string for that file. It can't claus, it *has* to pass the UA unfettered.

That does not mean it can't identify itself in over ways via HTTP, especially with respect to its prefetching activities.

> wastes your bandwidth. Agreed. how much it uses is open for debate.

Well I'd hardly say it's open to debate, but it varies based on the way the user uses their web browser. However, in my studies it prefetched at least three pages for every one that I accessed

I think the take away here is that if everyone would just install GZip on their websites, we would have the same effect in ALL browsers and not just in IE/Moz.

Agreed.

I think more people should de-bloat their web sites too. I saw one homepage today that weighs in at a massive 40KB. For every 1 byte of visible data, there's 4 bytes of bandwidth usage. That's not a ratio I'd be pleased about.

On top of that, they're not using any HTTP compression.