Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Productivity, Web services, Freeware, How-Tos, Unix, Browsers

If you frequently find yourself browsing on a low-bandwidth connection, you can potentially speed up your browsing experience by using the compressing proxy server at Toonel.net. The concept is simple: install their application on your personal (versions are available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Sun Solaris, and even Windows Mobile and Symbian), then set your proxy settings to point to your localhost IP address on port 8080 (127.0.0.1:8080). Once you do, all of your web traffic is routed through Toonel.net’s server, which compresses it before it gets to you.

The compression used is lossless, which is required to ensure the pages show up as expected, though there are image-specific options that allow you to change the compression that is applied to JPEG and GIF images. This is likely only worthwhile on a very slow network, since it takes the server a bit of time to recompress images before your browser can download them, but could be handy on a struggling network.

I wouldn’t recommend running Toonel.net full-time, or even at all if you’re always on a broadband connection, but if you find yourself struggling with a lack of bandwidth, this is a great trick to have in your back pocket.

[via TechRadar]

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Filed under: World wide web, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Web services, Google, Freeware, Browser Tips, Search

Have you ever wished you could apply the power of Google’s search algorithm to the bookmarks you have stored in Firefox? If you’re okay with uploading your bookmarks to a relatively unknown site, you can do just that.

Searchmybookmarks.com has a Firefox extension you can install that’ll upload all of your bookmarks to their server. Then, when you visit the site, you have the option of searching just your bookmarks, searching your bookmarks and the rest of the internet (but giving preference to results from your bookmarks), or just searching the web.

In my brief testing, the site is clearly still in beta, as some obvious search queries that should have returned many results from my bookmarks returned no results at all when searching only my bookmarks. Yet, if I selected to search both my bookmarks and the rest of the internet, those same results I was anticipating the first time around came out right on top of the result set.

If you were ever sure that you had something bookmarked, but couldn’t remember where, searchmybookmarks.com might just be able to help you find it.

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