I’ve been using the Google Accelerator since the day it came out. According to their timer as of this writing I’ve saved 2.5 hours. When the Accelerator is firing and the issues aren’t there, it does seem to speed things up a bit. My original comments on the Accelerator being released were somewhat brief and not very informative. I don’t believe in commenting in too much depth about software/hardware until I’ve actually had time to work with it. Also, I will give some leeway to almost any tool that attempts to save me the one thing I value most in work: time.

Now that I’ve had more time to review and use the Accelerator, cool revving icon aside, I’m significantly less impressed.

I’ve been reading, just like many others here, I’m sure, challenges and concerns that others have been having with the Accelerator. I can only speak from firsthand experience, but what I’ve read and heard has been significantly worse than what I have personally experienced. Fortunately, I haven’t had to uninstall and reinstall applications.

And it’s not just bad things I’m hearing from people I don’t know very well either.

My friend FranciscoIV had trouble with one of his machines and had to uninstall Google Accelerator. When he went to reinstall he was greeted by a message saying Google had maxed out [he has a screenshot] their capacity of users and are working to increase the number of users they can support.

Perhaps this is one launch where it would have made since to only invite select people in a private beta (not give those select people invites to give to others, I still think that practice is flawed).

Meanwhile, Stefano Demiliani writes about real world privacy troubles with the Accelerator:

Guys on the SomethingAwful.com Forum has discovered a big security and privacy hole: when they refresh the forum page, lots of time they were logged in as a different user.

I definitely believe the Accelerator is causing some programs trouble. However, I moderate a couple different messageboards and visit and read dozens of them and haven’t experienced this caching issue firsthand even one time. I’ve been expecting this to happen after reading some of these negative reports and it hasn’t … yet.

That’s not to say I haven’t noticed any issues with Google Accelerator. On the contrary, sites I have noticed issues with include:

- pages with lots of links. This can bring the system to a crawl as the Accelerator tries to cache way too many pages. If you are someone who reviews or frequently visits sites with lots of links on a single page, you will probably want to turn off Acceleration on these pages.
- Site Meter stats. The Accelerator makes the Site Meter summary stats pages go bonkers. Sometimes it showed yesterday’s stats, last night’s stats, it was all over the map whenever I refreshed so I just disabled and all was well.

Also I have had noticeably more problems with system slowdown with the Accelerator in Internet Explorer than in Firefox. The Accelerator just seem to behave more nicely in Firefox.

So even though the Accelerator says it has saved me 2.5 hours, I don’t think it’s really been anywhere close to that. I’d say maybe it’s saved me 45 minutes and that’s after a considerable amount of usage. If I’m being extremely generous I’d say it’s saving me half the time the indicator says it has saved.

To fairly measure time savings one has to look at the time spent waiting for CPU cycles and turning off the Accelerator on sites where it doesn’t work so well. Also, the Accelerator has been responsible for at least three complete IE browser crashes. As I write this the Accelerator is #3 on the CPU consumption of the dozen plus programs running at the moment.

As I write this though and read some of the heavy criticism being lobbed at the Accelerator, I’m reminded that wait, this is beta software. Google is testing this, they aren’t saying it’s ready for primetime.

I wonder if Google hasn’t created their own beta monster? Do netizens even believe in ‘beta testing’ any more from Google? Gmail has been in beta over a year now, Google News much longer in beta. This might seem like an unfair criticism, but IMO Google deserves the heightend criticism. They need to kick out some of these long time beta properties and make a clear path as to how long something is going to be in beta before people start treating their beta products like, well, beta products.

As I write this, tagging for Google Accelerator continues to roll in and many techies are weighing in, mostly negative on the Accelerator. That same site, fantomaster, provides some htaccess code to block the Google Accelerator.

I’m noticing via the Technorati links that many bloggers weighing in don’t have a lot of sources or links to them (yet).

As for the Accelerator breaking apps? Randy, from iBLOGther4im writes:

Google should have known they’d break many Web applications. A warning would have been nice. Or maybe they didn’t realize where the Web Accelerator would lead us.

Bottom line
I haven’t uninstalled the Accelerator yet, but I’ve definitely gone to the Add/Remove programs on more than one occasion. The Accelerator is decelerating my interest fast.

tags: Google+Web+Accelerator, Google, beta

Did this post make you go hmm?

Related Posts

• Goodbye Google Accelerator
• Google now accelerates your browsing
• Yahoo Site Explorer and Site Explorer API
• Google bundling Toolbar and Desktop software with WinZip
• Google module that shows Site Meter stats
• Pubsub linkranks returns