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Acrylic is a local DNS proxy which improves the performance of your computer by caching the responses coming from your DNS servers.

When you browse a Web page a portion of the loading time is dedicated to name resolution (usually from a few milliseconds to 1 second or even more) while the rest is dedicated to the transfer of the page contents to your browser. What Acrylic does is to reduce the time dedicated to name resolution for frequently visited addresses closest to zero possible. It may not seem such a great optimization but in a few weeks of internet browsing you will probably save an hour or so, which is definitely not such a bad thing. With Acrylic you can also gracefully overcome short downtimes of your DNS servers without disrupting your work, because in this case you will at least be able to connect to your favourite sites and to your email server. In addition Acrylic can help you to effectively block unwanted ads prior to their download through the use of a custom HOSTS files, optimizing your navigation experience even further.

Another good thing is that Acrylic is released as open source, which means that it's completely free and its source code, written in ObjectPascal with Borland Delphi, is freely available to anyone under the GNU General Public License.