In some African countries, wages are low and the price of a subscription to Internet is high. Millions of Africans can’t afford it and are excluded from the World Wide Web. And when they can, their internet bandwidth and quota are low.
By automatically generating a simplified version of websites, Surflight helps for free inhabitants of such countries to surf without having to wait for a while between each page. Each time you visit a website without Surflight, lots of files are downloaded without your agreement. Browsing lightened websites is faster and really cheaper if your download quota isn’t unlimited!
Url of the application: http://www.blocnotesenligne.com/surflight/
Team members: Xavier de Ryckel
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Additional info:
You can find how to use Surflight and more information about it here: http://www.blocnotesenligne.com/surflight/description.php.
Note that Surflight removes each image from a page to lighten it, but images are replaced by a tag “[IMG]” to allow people to download the image only if they want to. And if they like the page and that they want to see the real page, they can do it too by clicking on “Link to the full version of this page”.
To get an idea about how low is the average download speed in some countries, visit http://www.speedtests.net/world/. As you can see, the difference between the “best” and the “worst” download rate is very huge! And don’t forget that lots of people are below the average and that internet connection prices for the same download speed are not the same at all in each country!
Weight and time are money ! Check the difference between the lightened version of a website from Surflight and the original page by using this website : http://websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/.
For example, paste this url http://www.blocnotesenligne.com/surflight/index.php?url=inca-award.eu (the light version of http://inca-award.eu) in front of “Enter URL to diagnose:”, follow the steps and look at results : the total size is about 4000 bytes and it takes only less than 1 second to be fully loaded with a very slow connection speed (128k).
Now, try again with http://inca-award.eu : the total size is about 600000 bytes and it takes about 50 seconds to be fully loaded with the same connection speed (128k) !
People who use Surflight will be able to surf on more websites for less money !
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