01-19-2009, 02:45 PM

Until I kiss my local broad band provider's derriere, I'm married to dial-up — it's a long story. In the meanwhile I'm investigating web accelerators. To save me trial and error, I'd be grateful to hear from those who have been this way before.

01-19-2009, 03:05 PM

They wont make a huge difference, in my opinion you are better off saving your money, unless its a free one, you could use Firefox with ad block and a larger cache setting to achieve similar results

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01-19-2009, 04:58 PM

I've been considering Firefox because I'm sick of pop-up ads (NetFlex) making a home of screen. You've provided me with the motivation to abandon Camino for a trial with Firefox. I'd be grateful to know how a "larger cache setting" would alleviate my problem.

01-19-2009, 05:23 PM

I would download Firefox and use the FasterFox extension.

01-20-2009, 10:54 AM

firefox and camino would be your best bet. Firefox is also customizable to have additional add-on. One of which is a download accelerator.

01-20-2009, 01:15 PM

Originally Posted by protem

I've been considering Firefox because I'm sick of pop-up ads (NetFlex) making a home of screen. You've provided me with the motivation to abandon Camino for a trial with Firefox.

Expanding this post slightly, I too am currently on dialup while I'm away from home base .....
Before I migrated from dialup to broadband permanently, my ISP offered an accelerator as part of the subscription. I don't think it made much difference, but it did block certain elements that delayed page display (eg. animations, pop-ups).

Interesting you should consider going to FFox, I've gone from FFox to Camino because I was tired of the former's slow responses. Camino is fast, but it doesn't have the features of FFox, and I'm still ambivalent about the shift. In Camino I've not been able to find a setting for cache size.

Camino does block ads without need for an add-on. I've found the trick to be cookies. How many people read the description of a cookie? Many of them come from something that says 'ad' or 'ads' or 'adserver'. I decline ALL cookies, unless I know they're essential (eg. for login name and password), and so the page doesn't display ads.

Next - disable flash. Okay, you're going to miss out on the ability of Camino to play news clips etc in flash format, but it's an option to consider. With this very Mac-Forums, I've disabled the (for me) annoying flash page header, instead I get just the generic flash icon. One thing that does slow Camino is that the various servers look for the cookies that are expected to be on the computer's browser cache - and they aren't there. Checking the cache takes a few seconds, hence a delay.

01-21-2009, 05:36 AM

Web pages are now optimised for broadband. If you're stuck with ancient dialup, a 4 or 5% speed increase won't make any difference, even if a web accelerator could manage that. Bearing in mind that most of them don't do anything and are from an era when webpages were simple and everyone was on dialup.