Forum Moderators: open
I'm almost ashamed to admit I went to college for journalism.
[taipeitimes.com...]
[online.ie...]
[newsobserver.com...]
Now, really it would be interesting to learn where this acceleration should come from.
I did a search on google and was not able to locate the browser or the author. So who knows... time will tell. If it's that good of a browser it will start appearing on the net for download.
BTW, according to the news links the test was done on a 56k dial-up line.
He has been quite tight lipped about what exactly he has done to allow his browser to out class other browsers by a factor of 4/5, but speculation is that he's doing some kind of buffering/read-ahead to optimise the pipe.
There are many people working in the business in Ireland that are very skeptical about the claims made, but there is no detracting from the fact that this 16 year old is a very clever and talent young person.
It's definitely a "watch this space" thing!
is said to least quadruple surfing speeds
Prefetch. Enough said.
"At seven times it actually crashes so I have limited it to six."
That doesn't makes sense. An application usually doesn't crash by increasing some throughput, unless threading races are involved. But he still has to get the information from some place... see above.
"It is the first Internet browser in the world to actually incorporate a DVD sidebar. So you can watch a DVD movie in whatever screen size you want and browse the Internet at the same time"
I'm speechless. He's gloating over creeping featuritis!
My resolution: it's a fluffy duck :)
screen shot, beta version to test and more publicity could convince me though. :)
at this time ... i'll just wait and see, its a non-broadband internet connection dream!
That is how to roll your own web browser in fifteen minutes using kparts. Maybe in the week I'll think about adding the 6x performance. Or maybe not :)
I've extracted some info from the Irish Open Mailing List [topgold.com] to my weblog.
"I'd be very surprised if he wrote the whole thing from scratch - he'd definitely be an idiot in that case. It looked like a browser designed to look like an XBox - all luminous green buttons and metallic shading.
"I went into enough detail with the chap to establish what the speedup must involve (proxy servers, maybe an alternative streaming protocol, and maybe a rescheduling of the bits to download).
"There may well be something novel in what the kid is doing but I can't say as he was somewhat reluctant to explain it to me. He doesn't appear to have the depth of understanding of communications engineering which I would expect from some of the people working in the field (why should he?), so I'd be worried about some of the comments I've read regarding his 'breakthroughs'.
"The guy is not a fraud. He has built or assembled a piece of software which demonstrably improves on the market leader for a set of high-traffic websites over a certain connection setup, and that is no mean feat for a 16 year-old. He displays insufficient understanding of the technical details and sufficient vagueness about what he's doing to indicate that he's enjoying the accolades and doesn't feel the need to modestly pop the happy-clappies' bubbles.
"As far as tech papers are concerned, he is keeping some of the work secret until further notice. I asked him if he wanted to be famous, and when he said yes I suggested he donate his technology to an Open Source browser project such as Mozilla. If he does this we'll eventually see what he's done.
"As a footnote, I agree with Karlin Lillington. The media has not really hyped this, and I don't think Adnan was actively hyping it up (merely being mysterious and kinda letting it happen). I've just had a look at some of the comments, and you'd have to say it's a snowballing begrudgery phenomenon from hell (some of the one-liners are spotless though)."
There has been rumours of Eircom (on Open) and other big Irish companies buying the browser from him - was this more media hype or is there some truth to it?
[wired.com...]
