an excellent Firefox patch

[HarryKeogh]

http://bot2k3.net/forum/?showtopic=2840

 

[geni]

http://bot2k3.net/forum/?showtopic=2840

Of course certain site will ban you if you use this.

 

[richardm]

I can hear Darat sobbing from here.

 

[Rob Lister]

I can hear Darat sobbing from here.

Will this actually cause a lot of headaches if it catches on.

If so, I suppose I'll do the responsible thing and not install it.

For those of you too lazy to click the link, it's basically a firefox patch that speeds up the downloading of webpages by creating multiple connections/requests for the same page. I suppose if it was too aggressive you might find yourself auto-banned from some sites because you'd look like DOS attack.

Edit to ask: Wouldn't this screw-up a sites hit-counter?

 

[richardm]

Will this actually cause a lot of headaches if it catches on.

I suppose it depends on exactly what it is doing. A lot of these sort of things (like GetRight, for example) work by opening numerous connections at once and hauling down tons of data in one go. If everyone started doing that, the load on the server would go up.

I could imagine another way, though, which would be to have a single connection that loads the page you're looking at, then spiders its way through the website loading other pages in the background. When you then go and look at those pages they're already cached and waiting, kind of like a mini proxy server. While that would still be more effort for the server it's much less than if each browser was opening fifty simultaneous connections and using them to bring in data.

But from reading the comments at the link I'm guessing it's the first type.

Edit to ask: Wouldn't this screw-up a sites hit-counter?

Yeah, probably, although I'm not that convinced by how useful those things are anyway to be honest

 

[HarryKeogh]

after reading how this speeds up the connection I would like to change the adjective in this thread title from "excellent" to "interesting".

I wasn't aware of the mechanism behind the speed boost. My bad. Seems kind of underhanded.