The Jason Salas Experience

I just downloaded/installed Google WebAccelerator, which is available for Windows systems running IE 5.5+ and/or Firefox 1.0+ - installing the utility actually implements in both browsers, if resident on a PC. It appears to have addressed an earlier concern. To my surprise it's a browsing optimizer for broadband connections. As for how it works, there's a brief description upon installation (full profile here):

• Google Web Accelerator sends requests for web pages, except for secure web pages (HTTPS), to Google, which logs these requests. Some web pages may embed personal information in these page requests.
• Google receives and temporarily caches cookie data that your computer sends with webpage requests in order to improve performance.
• In order to speed up delivery of content, Google Web Accelerator may retrieve webpage content that you did not request, and store it in your Google Web Accelerator cache.
• To learn more, read our Google Web Accelerator Privacy Policy (http://webaccelerator.google.com/privacy).

I'm browsing now during my ISP's peak time, and visiting some fairly HTML and image-intensive sites, and it seems to handle images a bit better. Once cached, pages load at lightspeed. I still find Opera to be faster for raw pages right out of the gate, but this is nice.