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General:

1. What is SurfFast?

   SurfFast is a software application that allows you to "Surf the Web ... Better and Faster," and is the first of its kind for both MacOS 9 and OSX. More specifically, you can use SurfFast to control your browsing experience, by blocking popup windows, eliminating banner ads, disabling flash and shockwave movies, stopping background music, removing page and table background images, ignoring advertising and tracking objects, preventing JavaScript code from executing when entering and exiting pages and filtering resources based on their properties and content. And that's not all! Learn more about SurfFast by following the illustrated journey.

2. How does SurfFast work?

   SurfFast works as a local Web proxy and cache server, by listening on port 5678, by default. Once you configure either the operating system, or a specific Web browser, to use SurfFast as the Web proxy, all Web (HTTP) requests and responses will travel through the SurfFast server. SurfFast can then be configured to look for certain types of requests and specific patterns in response content and handle them appropriately.

3. Does SurfFast run on OS9?

   SurfFast is the only product of its kind to run on both OS9 and OSX. It was quite a challenge to get SurfFast to work properly on OS9, due to a number of technical issues with the Thread Manager and OpenTransport.

4. My browser also blocks popup windows. Why should I use SurfFast?

   A number of browsers on the market, including Safari and Mozilla, have implemented functionality to block popup windows. However, popups are only one of the many annoyances that we face every day. How many times have you had to deal with loud, flashing banner images or large shockwave movies that take up your entire browser space? Or even worse, advertisers use all sorts of tricks, ranging from WebBugs and cookies to manipulated URL, to keep track of your surfing history. Browsers are typically not designed to tackle these type of issues. And that's where SurfFast comes into play. SurfFast was designed from the ground up to provide you with more control over your browsing session, irrespective of what browser you use.

5. Can I configure SurfFast to be the Web proxy server for my entire local network?

   SurfFast is currently available only as a single user version; it has not been designed to handle requests from multiple computers. However, we are currently working on an enterprise version of SurfFast, complete with a Web interface, that can scale to handle hundreds of simultaneous users. If you are interested in this version, we would love to hear from you!

6. Will SurfFast slow down my Web browsing performance?

   When you issue a request for a URL from your Web browser, that request travels through SurfFast, to the remote Web server. And the content returned by the remote server is first parsed and filtered by SurfFast, and then sent back to your browser. As a result, there will be slight added delay in response time. However, since SurfFast can filter out a number of unncessary objects, such as stylesheets and banner images from known advertising sites, the overall response time will be faster.

   Certain Web sites, including most of the popular ones, such as Google and Yahoo, have the ability to return compressed content; compressed HTML content is typically 300-500% smaller than uncompressed content and thus will download and render much quickly. Unfortunately, not all browsers can deal with compressed content, most notably, Internet Explorer. However, with SurfFast in place, you you can take advantage of compressed content in any browser.