What is Connectix Surf Express 1.1x?

If you’ve ever screamed in frustration as your browser downloaded a recently visited page rather than grab it from cache, you’ll appreciate Surf Express. It replaces your browser’s cache with a more efficient version and can even retrieve pages before you ask for them.

The Surf Express CD-ROM installs an extension and two applications. From then on, whenever you launch your browser, a proxy server intercepts all browser traffic and saves the pages to its own cache. If you return to a page, you can view it from the Surf Express cache much more quickly than you would if it had to download again, and almost three times faster if from Netscape or IE’s built-in caches. Furthermore, it stores up to seven times more data in the same amount of hard disk space (an average of 200 pages in 10MB).

Surf Express’s SmartFetch feature makes the most of idle times by automatically downloading changes to your most frequendy visited pages, so subsequent requests are served in a snap. Occasionally Surf Express serves outdated pages, but clicking Reload downloads the latest data.

Surf Express works invisibly, but it comes with a control panel that displays statistics and provides the flexibility to tweak settings (even though the defaults are fine for most users) . An invaluable feature is FindCache, which shows the date, tide, and URL of forgotten pages containing words or phrases you’ve specified. Searching hundreds of pages takes only seconds, and viewing pages is almost instantaneous because they’re coming from cache. This alone is worth the price of the package.

Surf Express won’t work miracles (forget about Connectix’s “36 times faster” claim), but it does make the most of your modem by popping pages into place, pronto. The slower your modem and the more predictable your browsing routine, the more you’ll benefit from Surf Express.

Linzmayer, Owen W. (April 1998). Surf Express 1.1. MacAddict. (pg. 60).

Download Connectix Surf Express 1.1x for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.5

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver