text: how do web accelerators work? i recently installed the google web accelerator just to see if it did anything. i'm curious, though, as to how it speeds up my surfing. it uses data compression and prefetching of content which may be cached on google's servers to speed up page load times.  this is similar to fasterfox for firefox which uses unique features within the browser to uses idle bandwidth to cache and prefetch all the links on the page when you click on them.  as mikeiam20 pointed out, this is only going to make things faster on a broadband connection it will do little to nothing for dial-up.  there is no effective way to speed up dial-up connections.