Internet browser that quadruples surf speed

foobar

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Jan 12, 2003, 12:54:20 AM1/12/03

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http://www.newsobserver.com/24hour/technology/story/712974p-5244591c.html

Internet browser that quadruples surf speed wins Irish science prize

By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

DUBLIN (AFP) - A computer browser that is said to least quadruple surfing
speeds on the Internet has won the top prize at an Irish exhibition for
young scientists, it was announced on Saturday.
Adnan Osmani, 16, a student at Saint Finian's College in Mullingar, central
Ireland spent 18 months writing 780,000 lines of computer code to develop
the browser.

Known as "XWEBS", the system works with an ordinary Internet connection
using a 56K modem on a normal telephone line.
The software was tested by scientists at University College, Dublin last
week and they found it boosted surfing speeds by between 100 and 500 percent
depending on the basic dial-up connection rate.

Adnan says a six-fold increase is about the maximum practical boost.

"At seven times it actually crashes so I have limited it to six."

Other special aspects of his browser are the fact that access to 120
Internet search engines and other features such as music and video players
are built in.

"It has got every single media player built in. It is the first Internet
browser in the world to actually incorporate a DVD sidebar. So you can watch
a DVD movie in whatever screen size you want and browse the Internet at the
same time."

To make the software more user friendly, it features a talking animated
figure called Phoebe.

"The character interacts the entire way through the software. It can also
read out Web pages and e-mail and I thought it would be really useful for
the blind and young children because they can't really experience the
Internet.

"Someone like parents or guardians can load up some Web pages and it can
read out the pages to them," the young programmer said.

A number of communications and computer companies have visited Adnan's stand
at the Young Scientists exhibition in Dublin. He only patented his invention
to protect it last Thursday.

"Five or six companies have approached me about it. I am keeping a lid on it
for the time being. I am just waiting until after the exhibition and then I
will try to get it all organised."

He said he was still in a state of shock as he had not expected to win and
had only told three of his teachers last week about his competition entry.

"I thought I might get a good place."

He wants to study computer engineering in Harvard University and eventually
set up his own Internet or computer company.

"Winning is a nice boost to my university application," he said.

-----

If it works on dialup are we to assume that it would also work for DSL and
cable applications as well? I assume this because the fact that it is dialup
must be transparent to the Browser because the actual speed of the
connection couldn't be modified or optimized because standard POTS only
supports 33.6 kbps traffic anyway. As i understand it is only through the
use of the V.90 standard that we are able to have 56k-dialup access. As I
understand it V.90 allows us to dial directly into a higher speed digital
trunk, is this correct? Can some1 that knows explain this to us a bit better
please?

Michael Peuser (h)

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Jan 12, 2003, 6:02:54 AM1/12/03

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"foobar" <f...@bar.com> schrieb

> By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
>
> DUBLIN (AFP) - A computer browser that is said to least quadruple surfing
> speeds on the Internet has won the top prize at an Irish exhibition for
> young scientists, it was announced on Saturday.
> Adnan Osmani, 16, a student at Saint Finian's College in Mullingar,
central
> Ireland spent 18 months writing 780,000 lines of computer code to develop
> the browser.

This is NOT possible!!

>
> Known as "XWEBS", the system works with an ordinary Internet connection
> using a 56K modem on a normal telephone line.
> The software was tested by scientists at University College, Dublin last
> week and they found it boosted surfing speeds by between 100 and 500
percent
> depending on the basic dial-up connection rate.

What mechanism is responsible for this speed-up??

Looks like total nonsense!
Kindly Mike

Peter Kootsookos

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Jan 12, 2003, 6:07:25 AM1/12/03

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"Michael Peuser (h)" <po...@mpeuser.de> wrote in message
news:avrhv0$9sh$02$1...@news.t-online.com...

> "foobar" <f...@bar.com> schrieb
>
> > By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> >
> > DUBLIN (AFP) - A computer browser that is said to least quadruple
surfing
> > speeds on the Internet has won the top prize at an Irish exhibition for
> > young scientists, it was announced on Saturday.
> > Adnan Osmani, 16, a student at Saint Finian's College in Mullingar,
> central
> > Ireland spent 18 months writing 780,000 lines of computer code to
develop
> > the browser.
>
> This is NOT possible!!

But wait: there's more:

http://www.online.ie/business/latest/viewer.adp?article=1924781

says it's 1.5 million.

Ciao,

Peter K.

Al Dunbar

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Jan 12, 2003, 1:12:40 PM1/12/03

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"Peter Kootsookos" <p.koot...@remove.ieee.org> wrote in message
news:avricd$c16$1...@bunyip.cc.uq.edu.au...

Also says it is 5 times as fast, not just 4.

Interesting that a google search for this fellow's name gets five hits, all
in a non-English language apparently about non-technical subject matter. You
would think that a guy that could do this would have some sort of footprint
on the internet.

I wonder if the news organizations quoted in this thread simply believe the
spam that comes to their inboxes.

/Al

Joseph Seigh

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Jan 12, 2003, 3:59:50 PM1/12/03

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"Michael Peuser (h)" wrote:
>
> "foobar" <f...@bar.com> schrieb
>
> > By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> >
> >

> > Known as "XWEBS", the system works with an ordinary Internet connection
> > using a 56K modem on a normal telephone line.
> > The software was tested by scientists at University College, Dublin last
> > week and they found it boosted surfing speeds by between 100 and 500
> percent
> > depending on the basic dial-up connection rate.
>
> What mechanism is responsible for this speed-up??
>

Read that again. It didn't say it increased the download speeds. It said
it increased the surfing speed. And of course that would only work (if it
does work) if you surf the way it thinks you should.

Joe Seigh

Jason

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Jan 12, 2003, 4:55:42 PM1/12/03

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> Read that again. It didn't say it increased the download speeds. It said
> it increased the surfing speed. And of course that would only work (if it
> does work) if you surf the way it thinks you should.
>
> Joe Seigh

all that happens when you surf is you download pictures and html files. its
all the same.

Ben Pfaff

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Jan 12, 2003, 5:03:14 PM1/12/03

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"Jason" <board...@msn.com> writes:

> > Read that again. It didn't say it increased the download speeds. It said
> > it increased the surfing speed. And of course that would only work (if it
> > does work) if you surf the way it thinks you should.
>

> all that happens when you surf is you download pictures and html files. its
> all the same.

No, when you're using a web browser, there is often a lot of time
in which the connection is not in use, i.e. while you are reading
a given page. If the web browser can guess what link you're
going to click next, and download some or all of that page in
advance, then it can improve response time.
--
"It takes a certain amount of shamelessness
to be a monomaniac billionaire dwarf."
--Jon Katz <URL:http://slashdot.org/articles/99/03/17/1634238.shtml>

Michael Peuser (h)

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Jan 12, 2003, 6:27:21 PM1/12/03

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"Ben Pfaff" <b...@cs.stanford.edu> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:871y3im...@pfaff.Stanford.EDU...

> "Jason" <board...@msn.com> writes:
>
> > > Read that again. It didn't say it increased the download speeds. It
said
> > > it increased the surfing speed. And of course that would only work
(if it
> > > does work) if you surf the way it thinks you should.
> >
> > all that happens when you surf is you download pictures and html files.
its
> > all the same.
>
> No, when you're using a web browser, there is often a lot of time
> in which the connection is not in use, i.e. while you are reading
> a given page. If the web browser can guess what link you're
> going to click next, and download some or all of that page in
> advance, then it can improve response time.
> --

There are a lot of things one can imagine - that exactly was my question:
What did he do??

Kindly
Mike

David Chen

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Jan 12, 2003, 6:38:46 PM1/12/03

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> >
> > No, when you're using a web browser, there is often a lot of time
> > in which the connection is not in use, i.e. while you are reading
> > a given page. If the web browser can guess what link you're
> > going to click next, and download some or all of that page in
> > advance, then it can improve response time.
> > --
>

This is not even close to new.
I saw this feature a while ago (probably 4 years ago) in a downloadable
plugin for IE that would start d/l'ing the linked HTML files to the current
page one's reading.

Nowadays, such tech is already commercialized, eg. propel software, which is
much more aggressive; Propel's servers are colocated around the world (so
the user will connect to the nearest one) and the servers will compress
images and reduce quality if desired. In addition, it does the standard
caching. To actually d/l possible forward links is a bit wasteful, though,
IMO.

A lot of the features, eg. built-in media players are not even that
special... IE can do it. So it can play a DVD.... probably some plug-in
available to d/l that can do that in IE too.

David Chen

CBFalconer

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Jan 12, 2003, 7:15:11 PM1/12/03

to

Ben Pfaff wrote:
> "Jason" <board...@msn.com> writes:
>
> > > Read that again. It didn't say it increased the download
> > > speeds. It said it increased the surfing speed. And of
> > > course that would only work (if it does work) if you surf
> > > the way it thinks you should.
> >
> > all that happens when you surf is you download pictures and
> > html files. its all the same.
>
> No, when you're using a web browser, there is often a lot of
> time in which the connection is not in use, i.e. while you are
> reading a given page. If the web browser can guess what link
> you're going to click next, and download some or all of that
> page in advance, then it can improve response time.

And a good deal of time can be spent formatting the data to fit on
the screen or page or whatever is to be used for display. Making
fixed and (possibly) unwarrented assumptions could conceivably
speed that up a good deal.

--
Chuck F (cbfal...@yahoo.com) (cbfal...@worldnet.att.net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net> USE worldnet address!

Joseph Seigh

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Jan 12, 2003, 7:22:04 PM1/12/03

to

Well the article is certainly not giving anything away. Could be the prefetch
stuff which was what I was thinking of originally. The article does mention
text to speech conversion. Maybe it talks compressed/fast. You can listen
faster than you can read. Maybe it borrows technology from Readers Digest
and "condenses" the web pages. Hey, if I could condense usenet down to
meaningful content I could get a 100x increase in news article throughput.
Wouldn't be as much fun though.

Joe Seigh

Bill Godfrey

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Jan 13, 2003, 4:26:22 AM1/13/03

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"foobar" <f...@bar.com> wrote:

> A number of communications and computer companies have visited Adnan's
> stand at the Young Scientists exhibition in Dublin. He only patented his
> invention to protect it last Thursday.

Ah ha, something substantive. Does the Irish (or whoever) patent office
publish it's applications?

> "Five or six companies have approached me about it. I am keeping a lid on
> it for the time being. I am just waiting until after the exhibition and
> then I will try to get it all organised."

Nothing to see here, move along.

Bill, uses push technology.

foobar

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Jan 13, 2003, 5:05:20 AM1/13/03

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"Peter Kootsookos" <p.koot...@remove.ieee.org> wrote in message
news:avricd$c16$1...@bunyip.cc.uq.edu.au...

There is 1051200 minutes in 2 years. So he would have had to have written a
few lines of code a minute, which is pretty normal. But then you have to
take atleast half of that away to allow for sleeping/school and other
activities. There is no way possible to write near perfect (as in no
compiler errors or major bugs) code that fast.. or is there?

Joseph Seigh

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Jan 13, 2003, 5:18:59 AM1/13/03

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Bill Godfrey wrote:
>
> "foobar" <f...@bar.com> wrote:
>
> > A number of communications and computer companies have visited Adnan's
> > stand at the Young Scientists exhibition in Dublin. He only patented his
> > invention to protect it last Thursday.
>
> Ah ha, something substantive. Does the Irish (or whoever) patent office
> publish it's applications?

unread,

Jan 13, 2003, 9:04:24 AM1/13/03

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ke...@hplb.hpl.hp.com wrote:
>
> In article <3E2208AA...@xemaps.com>,
> Joseph Seigh <jsei...@xemaps.com> writes:
>
> > You can listen faster than you can read.
>
> I can read *much* faster than I can listen. And I can skim-read looking
> for the interesting stuff; I suspect that's much harder with voice.
>
> My reading speed is above average - but I doubt it's *that* much higher
> than average. (Anecdotal evidence only.)
>

I though there was research out there to that effect but this is all I could find.

http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/aug00.asp
http://www.ctr.columbia.edu/advent/library/readinggroup/liwei-non-linear-time-comp.pdf

Joe Seigh

greg stone

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Jan 13, 2003, 10:44:23 AM1/13/03

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"Aggro" <chai...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:xZwU9.778$MA...@read3.inet.fi...

He could of also used existing libraries or a code generator

Alan Balmer

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Jan 13, 2003, 11:16:17 AM1/13/03

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On Mon, 13 Jan 2003 14:04:24 GMT, Joseph Seigh <jsei...@xemaps.com>
wrote:

The first reference disagrees with your premise. I didn't check the
second.

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Jan 14, 2003, 8:04:26 AM1/14/03

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Al Dunbar wrote:
>
> "Joseph Seigh" <jsei...@xemaps.com> wrote in message
> news:3E233275...@xemaps.com...
> >
...

> > Office. You won't find it yet if it just got filed last week. They
> publish
> > applications but not that fast. Yes, I know it says he patented it but
> that
> > isn't correct. You can only apply for a patent. The patent office issues
> > a patent on your invention. And that takes a while, which means if he
> > had just got a patent, the application would have been published quite a
> while
> > back.
>
> So then, even if he has applied for a patent, doesn't mean it will be
> granted.
>

Correct. I should have mentioned. In Europe and elsewhere you have
to apply for the patent before (or with in a fixed amount of time after)
you make the invention public, hence his "sudden" application. But it
takes a while to prepare the applicatoin so he had to be working on
the application for a while.

In the US, patent applications aren't made public, so US companies
file early in the US and wait to the last minute to file elsewhere
as the press and competitors do look at the published applications
to see what those companies are up to.

Joe Seigh

William

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Jan 14, 2003, 11:35:09 AM1/14/03

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"CBFalconer" <cbfal...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3E21F8E7...@yahoo.com...

> And a good deal of time can be spent formatting the data to fit on
> the screen or page or whatever is to be used for display. Making
> fixed and (possibly) unwarrented assumptions could conceivably
> speed that up a good deal.

Or making reasonable guesses about what items the user is
interested in and fetching those first. (And not fetching
things that aren't currently visible, etc.) -Wm