By the way, you've just surfed into a website very rich in information about Windows software, tips, tricks and tweaks. Don't leave without exploring the resources listed on the main page.
For those among us who are still stuck with snail-fast modem connections, a crucial Web utility. Webcelerator speeds your Web browsing by pre-loading pages that the page you are currently on links to, and by storing locally, in a compressed cache on your hard disk, every page you visit.
Software Review - Pros
Webcelerator was not the first browsing accelerator I downloaded and tried. I began with NetSonic, another popular ad-supported program, but I wiped it off my disk in just a matter of hours - the reason being, if I remember right, that it was just overloaded with ads, making your surfing not easier, but, in fact, harder and more frustrating than before. The only memento I have of NetSonic is their spam email that has been filling up my mailbox ever since, and is continuing to do so even as you read. So, I downloaded Webcelerator. It installs seamlessly, though there are several nag screens prompting you to subscribe to various services or install certain software products - which is how Webcelerator is supported so that it can be free to use. Well, not quite; they have another source of income, and that is, their installation program should have installed their website as my default starting page - only that it never managed to do so, and I kept the best of both worlds: my new browsing accelerator and my old starting page (which, of course, is a local HTML file I've made myself and stored on my disk, thus drastically speeding-up browser startup time). So what do you get with Webcelerator, exactly?
Well, first of all, your surfing is improved a bit (but I wouldn't say a great deal). It is mainly noticeable when you re-visit pages you have already visited: in this case, Webcelerator shows you the stored page from its cache (which is as fast as it gets, faster than xDSL), and then only updates from the Net those parts of the page which have been changed in the meantime.
But where Webcelerator really comes into play is the offline browsing feature. Microsoft's built-in browser cache just can't compete. After you close your Internet connection, you can re-visit virtually all the pages you've visited so far - not only one out of ten as with Internet Explorer's built-in cache. So you virtually get an offline browser. And with a smaller, compressed cache to boot!
Then, you get a shortcut to the Excite and Google search engines.
Then, you get a TCP/IP optimizer (it adjusts the famous MaxMTU, TTL, and RWIN settings to prevent fragmentation of your IP packets, for which, otherwise, a separate utility - not necessarily free - is required).
In addition, it stops using bandwidth when it detects user activity.
Oh, yes, I forget: by editing the settings stored in the file Exclude.txt you can tailor how should specific Web sites be treated - completely cutting off ad sites, for instance. So there goes another utility you can safely dump now - the so-called ad eliminators which are intended for preventing commercials from taking up your precious bandwidth.
The build I am so satisfied with is build 202. After a year or so I downloaded build 205 and I must say I was deeply disappointed. The Prefetching options are not there anymore (so you can't select between Futuristic, Historical and Favorites prefetching anymore) and, worse still, as far as I could tell, there was no prefetching going on at all while I surfed the Net. Have they dumped the Prefetching feature altogether? And, if so, why? After all, it was one of the main features of the program!
As the cache increases over time, the Cairo cache browser gets slow to load, and if the cache gets corrupted, which may happen for millions of reasons, all generally attributable to improper Windows shut downs (buggy software, disk full, general protection faults, you name it - don't forget it's Windoze!), Cairo will refuse to load or even freeze.
Editing Exclude.txt may be less than intuitive to a novice user, especially as the meaning of their UNIX-or-regular-expressions-like wildcard characters is undocumented. For the record: Exclude.txt is the file where you specify sites or pages that are to be treated in a special manner (as opposed to your general settings): for instance, you may wish not to prefetch anything from a certain site, or perhaps exclude a site from showing up in your browser altogether. In fact, this file is not unlike the hosts file you get by default when you install Windows - only on steroids! In fact, while the hosts file only lets you exclude certain hosts (by re-routing them to your local machine, i.e. 127.0.0.1), Exclude.txt enables you to define more selective, refined rules.
A couple of times, Webcelerator erased its cache without notifying me, which may be quite annoying if you've just hastily blitz-surfed some Web sites, so that you could view them offline at leisure. In excuse, it should be noted that this only happened when my disk-space got dangerously low, and thus it may be a feature and not a bug: in fact, by resizing its cache, Webcelerator in all probability prevented yet another of the oh-so-common Windows crashes.
A minor glitch: it would really be such a great time-saver if Webcelerator could automatically detect whether you are surfing online or offline, and adjust itself accordingly, instead of you having to set that manually each and every time you change your browsing mode (which may occur tens of times per day)!
User Report - Tips, Tricks and Tweaks
General
First, a tiny sidebar: if you think that the concepts behind download managers, search robots, surfing accelerators, etc. are relatively modern, you're in for a surprise. The theoretical basis of all these solutions was in fact laid down in the prehistory of the World Wide Web (which is to say, ten or even fifteen years ago), including such complex concepts as how pre-loading page links for faster surfing could overload the bandwidth and trigger unexpected events in the case of links designed for interaction and not simply linking to a HTML page, and so on. Incidentally, read this excerpt from the Webcelerator's Help file:
On sites where clicking a link does more than just fetch a page (such as on-line shopping), Webcelerator's Prefetching may trigger some unexpected actions. If you are having problems with interactive sites (such as e-mail sites, online ordering, chat rooms, and sites with complex forms) you may wish to disable Prefetching at those sites.
The Prefetching option is best kept at its default - Futuristic. I have tried both Historical and Favorites, and their effect is not as positive, in fact I couldn't get the Favorites mode to work at all.
About the proxy method: on my system, it is definitely the one. Using the transparent method, in fact, Webcelerator's offline performance degrades to the level of Internet Explorer's default browsing cache: every other page is simply unavailable for offline viewing. Well, that's not why you wanted an offline cache, is it?
Speaking of which: I wish there was a quicker, wieldier way to purge Webcelerator's cache from unwanted entries, thus effectively transforming the cache in a really powerful offline database, containing all your favorite Web sites. By the way: apparently, Cairo is nothing more than a cache viewer (and not a cache editor). Its Delete from cache menu is a dummy menu. At least I've never managed to really delete anything from Webcelerator's cache so far. What's there once stays there forever! Until you delete the whole cache, that is.
Speaking of which: I wish at least there was a way to repair a messed-up cache. As it is, the first time an Internet session goes wrong and Windows hangs (which happens regularly, as you may well know), the Webcelerator's cache will certainly be broken and you will never be able to load it into the Cairo utility to browse it again!
Chaining Webcelerator and Proxomitron
The following probably holds true not only for Proxomitron, but for any proxy, although I have not tested it. The culprit, or the problem-maker, here is Webcelerator which writes its proxy-server and proxy-port configuration to the Registry every time you change your proxy configuration (say, by toggling Webcelerator from transparent to proxy mode or vice versa). So changing your proxy settings manually is not a viable option, since they are gonna be changed back to Webcelerator's default values (127.0.0.1:24491) the very next time you manually delete those values through the Internet ExplorerOptions dialog, or toggle Webcelerator from transparent to proxy mode or vice versa etc. What you must do is, launch Regedit, dig down to HKLM/Software/Acceleration Software International Corporation/Webcelerator and change the two string-values, named NextProxy_host and NextProxy_port, to Proxomitron's values, by default 127.0.0.1 and 8080, respectively. They will never automatically be changed back anymore (hopefully). Now all you have to do is launch Webcelerator and Proxomitron and everything should run without a glitch. Thus, information coming in from the Internet will pass through Proxomitron first, then through Webcelerator and, finally, it will be passed to your browser. This is the best configuration, since it allows you to only store pertinent (i. e. already processed by Proxomitron) information into Webcelerator's on-disk cache, thus making the cache smaller (void of ad banners, non-essential graphics and/or music, depending on how you have configured your copy of Proxomitron). Of course, it can also be done the other way around (having the information from the Internet pass through Webcelerator first, and then through Proxomitron), although I can't imagine who would want to have it that way. In this case, instead of modifying the two Registry values specified above, you must dig one key deeper, to HKLM/Software/Acceleration Software International Corporation/Webcelerator/Settings and change http_proxy_port to 8080, proxy_http to 127.0.0.1, proxy_port to 8080, and proxy_state to 1 (if you have left Proxomitron at its default setting, of course). You must be aware, though, that in this case two disadvantages apply: the data entering your cache won't be reduced, and you will have to change your proxy configuration every single time you toggle between Webcelerator'stransparent and proxy mode or, generally, change your proxy settings in any other way.
Can't Import Your Favorites To Prefetch?
When you decide to try to prefetch sites from your Favorites list, you must first tell Webcelerator to import them from your browser(s). Now, sometimes it happens that the first time, Webcelerator
will import them seamlessly, but if you close the Settings dialog and reopen it again to re-import your Favorites list or edit it, Webcelerator will simply freeze (give you a GPF and shut down). If this is your case, check your prefetch.dat in your Webcelerator directory (usually Program Files\Acceleration Software\Webcelerator): it is a plain text file. In my case, it contained some incredibly long and garbled links (URLs) to the Ask Jeeves search engine: as soon as I deleted them, Webcelerator purred along as a cat and never gave me a problem again.
