[Macanoid]

http://www.esatbt.com/esatcom/homepa...pr20031001.htm

"The Browser incorporates a novel algorithm that can increase the internet access speed fourfold facilitating multifunctional usage."

The 39th Esat BT Young Scientist of the Year is sixteen-year-old Adnan Osmani, a leaving cert student from St Finian's College, Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. His winning project, entitled "The graphical technological and user-friendly advancement of the internet browser: XWEBS" was announced by Minister for Education and Science Noel Dempsey TD, at the awards ceremony held this evening (Friday, 10 January 2003) at the RDS, Dublin.

The project impressed the judges with its comprehensive range of features that include an animated character - Phoebe - who uses human speech to read out web pages. Another clever aspect is a language translator, which converts foreign language websites into English. According to Adnan, "The Browser incorporates a novel algorithm that can increase the internet access speed fourfold facilitating multifunctional usage."

[JB72]

See what those Irish can do if they lay off the dang booze.

J/K!

[sushiism]

who cares how fast it is im not using a browser that has ms agent crap in it

[Hi I'm Ben]

that's because you're ignorant!

Originally posted by sushiism:
who cares how fast it is im not using a browser that has ms agent crap in it

[Macanoid]

Originally posted by sushiism:
who cares how fast it is im not using a browser that has ms agent crap in it

Indeed - it's not a ms browser. It's entirely new!!

[dwishbone]

all things relatively easy to implement if software developers would brainstorm a little more.
translation...just have a link to google translator or babelfish or something like that.
read out text of a site? what's new about that? this feature has been built into the mac for as long as i can remember. it should be easy to implement into a browser.
400% speed boost? 400% faster than what? i cant imagine anything faster than Safari or Chimera(w/ pipelining turned on). if it was it would load the page before i even clicked it! hey...theres an idea! telepathy. know what your gonna go to before you do. there's true innovation!!!

[Millennium]

Suffice it to say I'm a skeptic. At least show me a movie of this in action, and then I might believe it. But without any proof of these wild claims -and more importantly, plenty of evidence as to why this wouldn't even be possible- I see no reason to believe this.

[MacGorilla]

I'm with Millenium here. As Carl Sagan once said, "Extroidinary claims require extroidinary evidence".

[krove]

Oh boy, it even has a dvd player built in! I can browse and watch movies, all in the same application!

[Developer]

Originally posted by dwishbone:
400% speed boost? 400% faster than what? i cant imagine anything faster than Safari or Chimera(w/ pipelining turned on). if it was it would load the page before i even clicked it! hey...

That's easy to implement. Just prefetch all links to nude chicks. That should speed up usual web browsing by 400%.

[voodoo]

Originally posted by krove:
Oh boy, it even has a dvd player built in! I can browse and watch movies, all in the same application!

Isn't this a bit like Konqueror for KDE? Really a file/internet/multimedia browser?

[:XI:]

wasn't this comvered in the lounge when it was current?

[Sarc]

[Ozmodiar]

Originally posted by Sarc:
image

LoL

[sushiism]

Originally posted by Macanoid:
Indeed - it's not a ms browser. It's entirely new!!

oh please it'll just be the ms agent component inserted into it, like they've gone and redone all that crap from scratch. Go do a little windows programming and come back later

[Hi I'm Ben]

Ever been lynched?

Originally posted by sushiism:
oh please it'll just be the ms agent component inserted into it, like they've gone and redone all that crap from scratch. Go do a little windows programming and come back later

[sniffer]

Originally posted by dwishbone:
all things relatively easy to implement if software developers would brainstorm a little more.
translation...just have a link to google translator or babelfish or something like that.
read out text of a site? what's new about that? this feature has been built into the mac for as long as i can remember. it should be easy to implement into a browser.
400% speed boost? 400% faster than what? i cant imagine anything faster than Safari or Chimera(w/ pipelining turned on). if it was it would load the page before i even clicked it! hey...theres an idea! telepathy. know what your gonna go to before you do. there's true innovation!!!

Try a search on "Adnan Osmani" and you'll have about 500 hits in Google. About all hit results links to the same story, but in different languages.
A Norwegian page ( http://www.vg.no/pub/vgart.hbs?artid=3547087 ) have an interview with Håkon Wium Lie from Opera and he doubt that the XWEBS browser story is for real. This article also claims that XWEBS is supposed to be 4 times faster than the Opera browser, But no-one have yet to see it, it appears. At least no-one at Opera has.
I highly doubt this story.

[dfiler]

I am also a skeptic. This is likely a bullsh!t, publicity mongering press release.

You can only display images, text, and formatting as quick as they are received. The combination of current browsers and modern CPUs makes this display virtually instantaneous on fast internet connections. There have been incrementatl changes in how pages are partially rendered before all layout tags are closed. Perhaps the predictive algorithms used for these intermediate renders can be optimized a bit more.

If one were to replace html with another standard, perhaps a 4x speed improvement would be possible. But this relies on both a new browser and a new server as well.

The claim of a 4x speed improvement is either a lie or was made by a grossly misinformed, non-programmer.

[malbicho]

my question is: 4% or 400% or 700%, ok, but compared to WHAT? On which architecture? On which connection?

Is it only me not understanding?

[Bombia]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Sarc:
[/QUOTE

lol

[absmiths]

Usually they make statistics by testing I.E. 6 on a 14.4K modem, and test their crap on a T2 and claim that their "bandwidth tunneling through a multithreaded differentiated pipeline" makes the difference.

[Graymalkin]

This crap story was posted on slashdot a while ago and plenty was said about it then. My take on it is even if it gets X% faster performance than some browser it is likely do to a combination of pre-caching, HTTP acceleration, and pipelining.

Pre-caching is the browser resolving the links on a page before you click them so it will be constantly pulling the HTML for all the linked pages. You max out your connection but end up with some nice apparent speed increases because only the HTML is cached so you can make pipelined requests for images quickly. When you're loading a normal HTML page your browser either downloads an image as it finds the tag or waits until the HTML is fully loaded. If you can build a list of images you need you can cache them before you actually view the page.

HTTP acceleration opens multiple connections to a server questing the same file. Because of the wonky asynchronous nature of TCP connections you get a file's contents out of order. By opening multiple connections for the same file you take advantage of this and potentially speed up a download. A file's packets that are sent out of order will reach you around the same time with multiple connections open, by combining these out of order packets into the final file you get an apparent bandwidth increase. You can also have the accelerator look for mirrors so you can download from multiple sites at the same time using the same out of order recombine technique.

Pipelining just overloads HTTP requests so you spend less time waiting for response. You're only supposed to pack idempotent requests together. For instance packing a GET and HEAD request in the same TCP packet.

The combination of these three techniues has the potential to speed up web browsing over low bandwidth and high latency links. An accelerated pipelined request is going to make better use of your connection's bandwidth than single connection non-pipelined requests. Add these in with pre-caching and you've got pages that seem to magically and speedily load when you click the link. Revolutionary? Not really, these ideas have been around for a while.

Even though I think this whole thing is bogus if a 400% increase in browsing speed were actually had that is only a 4x increase which is in line with the numbers you see with download accelerator documentation. A 4x increase to a 1KB connection is only 4KB which is just maximizing your bandwidth pre-caching pages.

Of those three techniques two are sort of nice from a web site administrator's perspective. The more of a site that is cached the better it is for them for repeat offen^H^H^H^H^Hvistors. They only need to serve up their dynamic content saving a bunch. Pipelining HTTP requests is better for the internet as a whole because you can seriously reduce the number of packets needed to do something as simple as browse a web page. Fewer packets again is less bandwidth and less router traffic. Download acceleration then goes and kicks those two niceties in the groin. By opening multiple connections to a server for the same file you're filling up their connection queue. You're also causing routers to handle X times as many packets as you actually need on your end of the connection, duplicated packets are just thrown away (X being the number of simultenous connections you're using). For an administrator this is a PITA. For the amount of bandwidth used far fewer people are reaching your site because the connection queue or uplink path is filled to capacity.

[HiDDeN]

I'm pretty sure there comparing it with IE, as do most other browsers including Safari (Up to 5 times faster then IE and up to 3 times to Chimera). But hey, if thats the story? 400% is only 4 times and Safari goes up to 5 times faster then IE.

[MindFad]

Originally posted by Bombia:

lol

Sig violator of the year.

[sniffer]

Originally posted by HiDDeN:
I'm pretty sure there comparing it with IE, as do most other browsers including Safari (Up to 5 times faster then IE and up to 3 times to Chimera). But hey, if thats the story? 400% is only 4 times and Safari goes up to 5 times faster then IE.

That's on the mac side that is. XWEBS (stupid name btw) is, as if, supposed to be for windows.

[Kaner]

you arnt very smart are you sniffer

[sniffer]

Originally posted by Kaner:
you arnt very smart are you sniffer

Thanks

IE for windows and IE for mac aren't the same, or perhaps I am out of syntax? Ever seen the keynote? Safaris speed is compared with IE for mac.