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Turbo-Surfer
Get guaranteed faster page downloads. 
Up to 220% modem speed increase. 

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webROCKET

webROCKET Internet Optimizer is a powerful, easy-to-use program for Windows® 95, 98, NT, 2000, and Me which boosts your Internet connection speed by up to 200%.

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ModemMax
You can increase dialup modem connection reliability and performance by as much as 200%.

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When they hit on all cylinders, browser accelerators make Web pages pop up noticeably faster. But the magnitude of the speed boost you get depends on the accelerator you use and the way you surf the Web. In our formal lab tests involving a static Web site, none of the four accelerators we reviewed yielded any appreciable speed increase; and in some cases, they actually slowed us down. Only in our informal, hands-on tests, conducted over several days, did our surfing speed improve over what we obtained using no browser accelerator at all. The products we tested tended to increase our Web access speed only after learning which sites we repeatedly visited.

Most browser accelerators rely on one of two technologies: smart caching or read-ahead browsing. Smart caching first replaces your browser's existing cache and then pulls elements from your hard drive, the Internet, or both to accelerate Web surfing. The best products log the pages you frequent and keep them cached on your hard drive. Ideally, they draw only new content from the Web.

Read-ahead browsing works by prefetching text links (and sometimes graphics) while you're still reading a page. For the most part, read-ahead accelerators grab all the links on the current page, and then dump them into the cache in the background. When you finally get around to clicking a cached link, the destination page should pop up instantly from your hard drive.

How well the process works depends to a large extent on how the software is set up. At their default settings, most browser accelerators prefetch only text, and in some cases they limit the size of the text file. (PeakSoft's PeakJet 2000, for example, restricts prefetched files to 96KB, by default.) These limitations are necessary so that prefetching doesn't overwhelm your hard drive or your modem, especially when you download lots of graphics files. Every product uses a different set of defaults, however, and allows a wide variety of tweaks. Consequently, you'll probably have to tune the accelerator to your style of browsing.

In our informal, hands-on testing, NetSonic 1.02 seemed to work fastest, effectively using both read-ahead browsing and smart caching. NetSonic's read-ahead browsing technique works best with text-heavy sites that contain relatively few links. We used this function when calling up the latest edition of the Onion, a weekly satirical online newspaper. NetSonic downloaded the initial page and then preloaded all of the main page's 15-odd article links. By the time we were ready to click over, the pages were all cached and appeared instantly. (Unlike its peers, NetSonic prefetches only text; there's no option to prefetch graphics.)

Two other features recommend NetSonic: We found it by far the easiest browser accelerator to install, and it's the only one we looked at that costs nothing. (A $39 deluxe version, NetSonic Pro, adds a handful of useful improvements, such as graphics prefetching.)

Like NetSonic, Surf Express Deluxe version 1.5 ($39 from Connectix) has an efficient smart-cache system. It loaded pages noticeably faster when we used it to revisit pages it had already cached, and it can cache up to 10MB. But Surf Express lacks prefetching capabilities and can't cache graphics larger than 100KB.

PeakSoft's $29 PeakJet 2000 version 2.0 showed occasional performance gains as well. Like NetSonic, it uses both caching and prefetching. To keep your modem from putting in too much overtime, it limits prefetched files to a default size of only 96KB. It does, however, give you a number of useful options for controlling what it caches.

Kiss Software's $50 Speed Surfer Internet Toolbox version 4.0 was the most difficult accelerator of the bunch to set up, for formal testing (with Navigator 4.5) and informal testing (with Navigator 4.06). In both kinds of testing, the program regularly stumbled over Web page graphics--once substituting a tiny icon for one of our large test graphics--and sometimes skipped them altogether. It hung up the browser on multiple occasions, too. On the other hand, Speed Surfer does offer such desirable Internet security features as anonymous cookies and e-mail encryption.

Our overall take? Browser accelerators work best on text-heavy Internet sites that you revisit frequently. If you go ahead and install one, though, don't plan on achieving huge speed gains.

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