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Pump Up Your Browser

Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator are wimpy. Whip them into shape with these Web utilities--bookmark managers, download tools, offline browsers, connection aids, even audio and video plug-ins.

  

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If you find paging through a Web site more tedious than doing morning sit-ups, check out our review of Web accelerators and offline browsers in "Browsing Faster." Both types of utilities claim to make links connect faster. Web accelerators speed up your browser's built-in page caching, install their own cache on your PC, or do both. Offline browsers download a site's links plus--unlike Navigator and Internet Explorer--its entire structure onto your hard disk. They work on the assumption that you can browse a site more quickly and conveniently if you don't have heavy Web traffic or a slow modem connection to contend with.

All five of the accelerators we tested shaved a few seconds off some link-to-link jumps, but beware: Because of the way they work, some programs can crash your system. Our Best Buy, IMSI's $30 Net-Accelerator 1.1, was the only accelerator that didn't bring our test system down.

Offline browsers, we found, vastly improve page-to-page progress. These utilities take up space on your hard drive with downloads, but they won't corrupt your browser settings or hog your CPU the way accelerators can. Our favorite, Anawave's $30 WebSnake 1.23, can fetch particular pages, the entire structure of a site, or individual files that contain keywords you specify.

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