Blaze! works four ways to speed up Web access

The Web is so slow for some people that they call it the WorldWide Wait.

As more people clog the Internet, it becomes harder to gettimely responses from our favorite sites. Besides speeding up yournetwork connection, can you do anything to speed up your Internetsoftware?

Yes. Two classes of products - one that aims to speed upWorld Wide Web access and one to take more of it offline - are yourprimary Web access speed helpers.I've written before about software that gives you offlinebrowsing capabilities, such as QuarterDeck's WebCompass, and I'llrevisit them again soon. Today I look at the first type.Two of the most prominent net access accelerators are Net.Jetfrom Peak and Blaze! from Datalytics. I've just reviewed the mostcurrent release of Blaze! and it does indeed speed up Web access.The Blaze! Web Performance Pack 1.1 is a suite ofapplications that address the three biggest complaints of Web users:The Web is too slow.The Web makes it too hard to find or return to information ofinterest.The Web makes it too difficult to organize a high volume ofretrieved information.Blaze! is the first software product to be powered byDatalytics' xSpeed Web server technology, which provides measurablespeed gains for your Web browser as it accesses and loads Web pages.The program works with the two most popular browsers, MicrosoftInternet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. If you have SpyglassMosaic or other older browsers, Blaze! can't help you.In my tests, Blaze! reduced the time it took to link to anddownload a Web page usually by a factor of two and sometimes greater.It speeded up both real-time browsing and Web searching.The Blaze Web Performance Pack 1.1 speeds up your browser fourways:JCompression reduces the amount of information required to downloadWeb pages from Web sites to your browser. This works only on sitesusing Datalytics xSpeed technology.JEncapsulation reduces the typical 20-30 intermittent connectionsrequired to download a Web page to fewer than eight. Likecompression, this works only on sites using Datalytics xSpeedtechnology.JRead-ahead browsing uses idle modem time to pre-fetch links on apage. It uses artificial intelligent techniques to gain a feelingfor how you browse and it puts that knowledge to work inpre-fetching. JIntelligent caching speeds up your native browsercache and loads pages into memory that are likely to be requested -where they run much faster.In other words, Blaze! works like Net.Jet when it's helpingyour browser access a site that does not use xSpeed. Blaze'sread-ahead technology downloads and caches pages linked to thecurrent page you have open. When it's right, this method can improveWeb page display performance by as much as 500 percent, (which isstill not quite as fast as Net.Jet, but the latter product can't usethe xSpeed site improvements like Blaze!), making Blaze! faster withthose kinds of sites.Blaze! can produce some anomalies, however. I had troublewith both Netscape and Internet Explorer crashing after I installedBlaze! These problems forced me to reconfigure both browsers' cachefile sizes and to tinker with other preferences to make them performproperly with other Blaze! features. Blaze! was also consistentlyless fast at accelerating straight read-ahead cached pages thanNet.Jet, although it still managed to cut in half the page accesstimes for most of the pages I hit.Despite its problems, I liked Blaze! and will continue to useit.Blaze! costs $49.99 and you can download a free, 15-day trialversion from the Datalytics Web site. You need a Windows 95 or NTmachine with at least 16MB of RAM, 10MB of free hard drive space,either Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer and an Internetconnection to make it all work.Crabb's Bottom Line: Blaze! Web Performance Pack 1.1. TheGoods: A software-only accelerator for the Internet. Rating: 9.0.Vendor: Datalytics. Platforms: Windows 95 or NT, Netscape orInternet Explorer. URL: http://www.datalytics.com. Phone: (937)226-7700. List price: $49.99; 15-day trial version available forfree downloading at their Web site. In Short: Speeds Internet accessfrom top to bottom.