Google Wednesday announced the beta release of Google Web Accelerator, a free downloadable application that the search giant says will enable Web surfers who use Firefox or Internet Explorer to view
Web pages more rapidly. The application runs in the background on a user's desktop, and utilizes Google servers and the users' own PCs to "pre-fetch" Web sites, so that when the user chooses to access
them, they appear more quickly. The program also adds a toolbar item to the user's browser, displaying how much time the application has saved by loading the pages faster.
-- Shankar Gupta
