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[ Go to "Turbo Charge Your Browser" ]
Cover Story
-- by Lenny Bailes
ForeFront's WebWhacker was the original Web page-downloading application for Windows. It had--and still has--one feature that the other products lack: It can follow site references to ftp addresses and successfully retrieve files from ftp archives. In other areas, however, our testing suggested that WebWhacker 2.0 has lost its edge. The WebWhacker applet must be configured as a Netscape proxy server and, as such, slowed down Netscape's browsing speed considerably (even when we weren't downloading a site). WebWhacker also interfered with our ability to access messages at a conferencing site and was unable to retrieve and play back embedded QuickTime movies, Shockwave multimedia and JavaScript graphics. WebWhacker 2.0 can follow unlimited off-site link levels. The program includes WebManager, a basic bookmark utility that organizes "whacked" URLs into category folders. WebWhacker's scheduler can recontact a bookmarked site daily, only on weekdays or on a specific day of the week. If WebWhacker detects changes at a site, it downloads and replaces the complete page or pages. WebWhacker 2.0 creates a single "Headlines" HTML page that reflects all the sites you download and which are written into a single storage archive. You can import bookmarks from profiles created in WebWhacker 1.0 into the new version. But to actually see those pages again, you must go online and download them again into WebWhacker 2.0. WebWhacker 2.0 contains a partially functional export filter that lets you copy individual page components from the archive to disk--but the internal links between them are lost.
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