Gottfried,
I have the trial version of MicroSurfer on my machine, and I like it. I used it to browse the CNET home page and dragged various links into the program's window. By the time I finished reading the first page, half of the links had been loaded. When I clicked on a loaded link, the entire page appeared in under 2 seconds. I went through the list without waiting.
Then I quickly selected a dozen or so large pages, each with a number of font samples. I went offline and browsed through the whole list. By this time I really had waited for only one page to load, the home page. I connect at 24 or 26.4, so it saved me a lot of time. Whether the program will still be as useful when my neighborhood gets ADSL is iffy, though. My daughter has a cable modem and I don't think I would need to use it on that machine except for video clips or MP3 files.
It's handy to use as a trail marker. Sometimes I go off in an unexpected direction for a while, then decide to go back to the links that I originally thought looked interesting. This can take some time, depending on the state of my memory that day, and the organizational skill of the webmaster. But by clicking on the first green dot on the list, I get the page I want instantly.
This program is only for IE4, WIN95/NT. And it doesn't work on SI. It will not preload pages that are rendered in the browser by a script. SI pages are apparently this type, and instead of a green dot next to the listed link, you will see a red X.
I've gone back to my EZMacro program for getting around SI. The hotkeys are located so that I can use all the main links in the site basically without moving - catching up with the messages seems to go a little faster.
--Frank |
