I dumped Google Web Accelerator the other day. Its proxying was proving to be a distraction in my day-to-day life.
Don’t get me wrong: browsing with GWA on is insanely fast. I noticed the jump right away when I installed it, and I started seeing images get all pokey again once I uninstalled. But if I’m testing my internet connection, and it gets me a copy of a page I loaded five minutes ago, it’s lying to me, isn’t it? For the regular web, that’s fine, but my own pages and my own changes should get special treatment, and it’s tough to remember to whitelist (blacklist?) everything that I don’t want acceleration on.
The worst was when I was configuring my router. The local cache was serving up old copies of 192.168.1.1, when 192.168.1.1 was actually unreachable. That’s no good.
I’ll leave aside the debate about whether or not GWA will actually go out to other people’s caches and deliver pages that weren’t meant for you. There were definitely some strange results arising from the use of this system (leading one site I visited last week to block GWA users completely, saying that you should uninstall the software and come back), but I think Google wasn’t bending the rules so much as shattering expectations. It’s a cool idea, it really works, and I hope they iron the wrinkles out.
Accusing Google of snatching passwords, reading emails, assembling dossiers, and watching you sleep are all monster-under-the-bed thinking. I won’t even address that here.
