Click here to see the index of Craig's columns.

In a recent column I explained how a web browser's cache makes your surfing experience move along more quickly. Browsers automatically copy a web site's data to the hard drive for instant retrieval so that it doesn't have to download it all over again when you revisit. This saves you lots of time, especially if you don't have fast broadband access like cable or DSL and are still poking along with a 56k modem. All of the popular web browsers have a cache but you have limited control over any of its characteristics. Most browsers allow for setting the size of the cache to hold more data and that's about it. Unfortunately, the browser's management of the data stored in the cache is dealt with fairly simplistically. For example, if you return to a page you have visited recently and only one element of that page has changed since your last visit, the browser updates the entire page from the Internet rather than from the one stored in your much faster cache. Fortunately, an alternative, more intelligent caching product exists and its name is NetSonic.

NetSonic creates its own cache independent of the browser's. Once created, the same cache will work for any browser. If you have more than one browser such as Netscape and Internet Explorer, they all share the same NetSonic cache. This is a nice ability since you save precious hard disk space plus if you have visited a web site using one browser, you will still experience cache acceleration if you return to that same page with a different browser.

NetSonic's caching ability is a lot smarter that your browser's. Given the example of returning to a web page that's slightly changed, NetSonic will only retrieve the data that has been altered while obtaining the rest of the page from the faster cache. But it goes a lot farther than that. NetSonic also caches Domain Name Server (DNS) information. When you type in a web site name you want to access, the browser must first go to a computer that looks up that name and converts it into a unique numerical value called an IP address (sort of like a telephone number) that it can understand. Every time you click on a link, the browser has to access the DNS. But with NetSonic, the address is also stored in the cache so when you revisit that link, you save time by not having to go to the DNS to look it up again. And since all of this happens automatically in the background, the only thing you'll notice is faster surfing. In fact, NetSonic lets you easily switch its caching on and off so you can compare speed results. You can even call up a speed gauge that helps you to visualize the increase in speed.

NetSonic is a free program and can be obtained form NetSonic's web site. NetSonic hopes that you will like their product so well that you may choose to upgrade it to their more robust NetSonic Pro that sells for $39.95. The Pro version offers a pre-fetching technique to increase surfing speed even further. Normally when you arrive at a web page, your browser sits idle until you click on the next link. NetSonic Pro takes advantage of this idle time by first looking at all the links on a page and then downloading those linked pages into the NetSonic cache. This way, when you click on a link, the page literally snaps up on the screen. If you have visited the page before, NetSonic Pro is smart enough to know which links you selected previously and will start caching them first on your next visit. You can even control the levels and prediction methods which NetSonic Pro uses in selecting links to cache. Other features include being able to exclude rapidly changing pages from being cached, and offline browsing for users wishing to browse directly from the cache when not connected to the Internet.

Currently, NetSonic only works with Windows 95 or 98. A newer 3.0 version will be introduced later in August and will work with Windows 2000, NT and ME.

NetSonic
(425) 836-3000
www.netsonic.com