Richard Fangnail said:
I just loaded the Google toolbar for the first time and I feel that
loading pages is slower, but I'm not sure if I'm not imagining it.
If the Google toolbar is loaded but hidden, is it still operating?
Is turning popup blocker on/off supposed to make all pages slower or
faster?
Did you enable the advanced options (which also happen to track your
navigation)? They are Page Ranking and Page Info. Both require that
you navigate through their server so they can add your navigation to
their statistics (hence the ability to show related pages and to show
how many folks have visited there). This also means that Google tracks
to where you navigate. They don't care about you in particular but want
to know how often a site has visitors and need to know to where you
navigated to know what might be similar sites. If you don't want those
features then disable them in the Google Toolbar. I've never found them
of much use. It also means you add another point of possible failure in
your route since you must go through their servers before they redirect
you to the targeted site (check your firewall logs to see this happen if
you have those advanced options enabled). If their servers are slow or
busy then so, too, is you getting redirected through those servers. The
route to their servers may incur hops that have longer delays than if
you route more directly to the target site.
