Question about new internet technology

[Jacob S]

I seen a commercial on tv and below is the information I seen on their website at this link http://www.netzero.net/popup/learnmore-hispeedfaqpop.html and I am wondering if you have to get NetZero to get this technology or if this can be found somewhere else on the internet in which would help speed up web browsing.

What is NetZero HiSpeed?
NetZero HiSpeed is an exciting new product from NetZero that accelerates your Web surfing experience using your existing phone jack and modem. NetZero HiSpeed INCLUDES your NetZero Platinum Service and requires NO additional equipment and NO waiting! It is the high-speed surfing solution with the convenience of dial-up.

What gets Accelerated?
What will be accelerated
Web pages - HTML markup and JavaScript
Graphics including JPEG and GIF images
Text
E-mail on the Web

What will not be accelerated
Streaming media, audio and video files
Secure pages, such as those used for online banking and credit card forms
Files and attachments such as music or digital photos.

How does it work?
Before the text and graphics that make up Web pages get sent to you over your phone line, NetZero HiSpeed compresses them using a proprietary technology. Less data is sent so the download of pages and your surfing experience are that much faster! In addition, NetZero HiSpeed stores elements of the Web sites you visit frequently so you do not have to re-download them every time you visit these sites.

[lee635]

You can speed up your page loads dramatically by simply setting your browser to not load pictures and not load backgrounds, special fonts and so forth. Just change your options.....

[Jacob S]

When I read that on their website it made me think it was a marketing gimmick using some type of software because I knew you could not get 5x the speed on everything from a dial up modem.

[Steve Mehs]

NetZero HiSpeed stores elements of the Web sites you visit frequently so you do not have to re-download them every time you visit these sites.

Wow they must really be desperate by promoting that. Did they ever hear of cache/temporary internet files. I would never trust Net Zero for anything.

[firephoto]

Originally posted by lee635
You can speed up your page loads dramatically by simply setting your browser to not load pictures and not load backgrounds, special fonts and so forth. Just change your options.....

Opera (http://www.opera.com/) has two buttons for doing this. One toggles between all pictures (normal), cached pics, or no pics. The other button toggles between author mode, and user mode so you pic your fonts and colors for your user settings and you can use these if you choose. Pretty slick setup and makes the fastest browser even faster when you don't need to see a bunch of ads or annoying graphics.

I think I saw a discussion on http://www.dslreports.com/ that said they just use a compression scheme to compress everthing that isn't compressed already which doesn't help much because most (all?) modem use compression by default and so does XP's dialer.

[Mark Holtz]

It's a gimmick... nothing more.

The best way to speed up your browsing is to use some filtering software that prevents pop-up windows and removes advertising. Opera has that built in, and www.myie2.com has that as well. I think Mozilla has that as well, but don't hold me to that.

[Jacob S]

I am using opera now and use that a lot because it is a faster browser before changing any settings.

[marko]

It sounds like browser requests through net zero go through a proxy server that compresses the data before it gets sent to your computer. I'm sure they do quite a bit of caching on those servers too.

Compressing images/pages will result in an increase in speed for dial up users. The questions is how much. And I'm sure it depends a lot on what you are looking at.

[Mark Holtz]

By their very nature, gifs and jpegs are already compressed. You can, however, reduce the size of the jpeg by reducing the quality.

[Mike123abc]

Of course the fastest pictures load when they are reduced in resolution to one pixel that is the average color of the picture. Just a giant grayish block! :coffee

[firephoto]

:lol:

Would images and such on the web load faster if they weren't compressed and were allowed to be compressed by the hardware transporting the data? I know when I had a Sony Clie and was trying to set up some mapping apps I found that I could load BMP's faster than JPEG's with the only problem being the BMP's took a lot of memory. I know this wasn't transporting them across a network but these were 5-10 mb bitmaps and they were loading faster than 500k jpegs. Maybe this is something that would work better with broad band rather than dial-up.