Browsing Frugally Without Wasting Bandwidth? 450
forrestm writes "At home, my internet connection is limited to 1GB / month before I have to pay extra. At my university, I'm charged around 2.5c per megabyte. I rarely download anything big, but I often go through a large amount of bandwidth by simply browsing around. For example, when I play a YouTube video, click a link, and then return to the video, the whole video reloads. When I read some websites, such as BoingBoing.net or Cnet.com, my status bar shows a whole lot of data being transferred through other domains. Some pages seem to send/receive data at certain intervals for the duration of my visit. When I begin to enter a search in Firefox's search bar, a list of suggestions is automatically downloaded. In addition to this, Firefox often requests internet access of its own accord, even though I have automatic updating turned off. All this is costing me! How do I stop unsolicited use of my internet connection? How do I go about not wasting bandwidth like this?"
make believe you are a cell phone (Score:4, Interesting)
force text only. no flash or images
and set your browser to identify yourself as say, blackberry's browser. opera can do this sort of cloaking through an easy menu interface. large sites you visit will automatically downstep your content. otherwise, purposefully only visit sites that are mobile friendly versions of the main sites. for example, slashot's mobile friendly site is http://slashdot.org/palm [slashdot.org]
Re:To quote Adam Savage: (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Squid. (Score:3, Interesting)
I like polipo [jussieu.fr]. It's much, much easier to use for personal browsing and you can have it cache your cgi-bin stuff or whatever. You should be able to set it up to cache the youtube videos, even if they are 'Cache-Control: no-cache'.
I tried to install squid, but it brought back sendmail nightmares. Squid is just way overkill for personal browsing proxy/cache.
Re:To quote Adam Savage: (Score:3, Interesting)
Disable prefetching (Score:5, Interesting)
about:config
network.prefetch-next false
Try a compressing proxy (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems that RabbIT [khelekore.org] does that too, but I've never used that software myself.
Re:No Script (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Disable prefetching (Score:3, Interesting)
Crap like this enabled by default hurts Firefox mindshare.
From my about:config there dozens of entires i had to manually change for firefox to work smoothly,plus adblock.
Adblock doesn't have the NoScript functionality of "Block everything unless i told you otherwise" and i have to block ads one by one(i don't use susbscription filters).I once tried using blocksite,but its much slower to operate and interface is primitive.
Re:No Script (Score:3, Interesting)
A Website that can't be viewed with Lynx is a Web site not worth visiting.
So how would you rate my university's website, the only place I can sign up for my classes (IE only)? Should I quit until they fix it for lynx?
Re:Disable prefetching (Score:3, Interesting)
From https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ [mozilla.org]:
It is important that websites adopt tag based prefetching instead of trying to roll-in silent downloading using various JS/DOM hacks. The tag gives the browser the ability to know what sites are up to, and we can use this information to better prioritize document prefetching. The user preference to disable tag prefetching may simply encourage websites to stick with JS/DOM hacks, and that would not be good for users. This is one reason why prefetching is enabled by default.
Maybe you still disagree, but I think that is a well thought-out argument for having it enabled by default.
Re:That's lousy (Score:2, Interesting)
Lucky us. Netherlands mostly is fair use policy: use anything you want, just dont upload on 100% capacity all the time.
In my case: upload more than 80% and your downloadspeed will get less optimal: just network behavour by design. So we just limit it on 80%, thats about 75kilobyte/s.
25eur/month.
Re:Squid. (Score:1, Interesting)
FlashBlock is all you need for YouTube. All their vids are wrapped in a Flash player so FlashBlock by default blocks all YouTube videos (instead showing an empty space with a Flash icon in it).
You can click on the flash icon to allow that specific Flash element to load. Even if you refresh a YouTube page FlashBlock once again blocks the video until you chose to manually click on it.
Plus FlashBlock wipes out 50% of online adverts. Couple FlashbLock with AdbLock and you have one extremely peaceful browsing experience.
populate a HOSTS file, honey (Score:2, Interesting)
There are dozens of websites that compile canonical lists of URLs that peddle ads, spam, porn, and other crap. Start with the doubleclick sites. The lists commonly exceed 100,000 entries. Instead of matching to 127.0.0.1, use 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.0 .
Komando.com hosts one very good one. Using a host file is a good idea for business computers. It'll cut bandwidth usage in half or a third.
Re:That's lousy (Score:3, Interesting)
I digress. About 4 of us in one staircase had a computer, yet there was no Internet connection and no telephone lines. In the end we got together and ran a phone line from the 1st floor communal area up the staircase and devised a switch to allow each computer to connect. It didn't always work and WinSock was a real pain.
Damn, how things have changed, Southside sucked in so many regards but it was fun 'hacking' the building, underground passages and more. Are the computer labs (I used EEE, CS and Maths) still 24 hour?
Re:That's lousy (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure bandwidth would not be such a concern if all the packets you requested weren't going overseas. In other words, if Australia had internet sites worth using they would see faster access and eventually more countries clamoring to build pipes to it, instead of the other way around.
Re:That's lousy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No Script (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why every site I create is built in plain ol' XHTML/CSS first. Once that's done, I'll go ahead and 2.0 it up a bit with some fresh AJAX, but I'll leave the original functionality of the site untouched.
JavaScript enabled? You get the full experience.
JavaScript disabled? You also get the full experience.
<sarcasm level="extreme">What?
Not every web developer is a conscientious as me?
That's an outrage!</sarcasm>
Seriously, though, why, in this day and age of the internet making information to all, are web developers not interested in making information available to ALL, anymore? Why go out of your way to cut off a large portion of your viewership?
Even sites which rely on ads or subscriptions.
Especially sites which rely on ads or subscriptions.
admuncher (Score:1, Interesting)
www.admuncher.com
not only does it block ads and other such items it actually stops it from retrieving content from ad sites and actually retrieving ads. Thus saving bandwith.
On this machine since April 2007 I have "saved 2,977MB of bandwith".
I have used admuncher for so long that when a friend complained about the ads on myspace I was like "what ads?". And then I disabled admuncher and refreshed - what a difference.
LoBand! (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.loband.org/loband/main
Re:That's lousy (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually we might better see computers as a culmination of several centuries efforts. I believe it is the poet Lord Byron's daughter or grand daughter that came up with the notion of digital information processing and that has been quite a few decades back to say the least. Then there are all of the mathematical, chemical and physics issues that had to be hammered out and finally the birth of electricity, electronics and even the notion that individuals might find computers useful that had to be developed.
An elderly relative asked me about 1989 why I wanted to purchase a computer. She could not understand what I needed to compute. Despite a high education and extremely high I.Q. the idea of computing was lost to her.
Re:That's lousy (Score:4, Interesting)
Telecom NZ was formerly a subsidiary of NZ Post and thereby wholly owned and controlled by the government. The New Zealand economy went into a tailspin beginning in the 1970s, hit with the oil shock and the diminution of trade with its largest overseas market, the UK, who had just entered the European Common Market. In response, during the 1980s and 90s the governments, first Labour and then National, went on a privatization binge (see Rogernomics [wikipedia.org]) and sold off infrastructure right and left in an effort to encourage capital investment. Power generation and transmission, rail lines and rolling stock, and the telephone network were peeled off and their new corporate structures were remarkably free of constraints or oversight from the former owners.
As a result of this monopoly position, Telecom has had two decades in which to milk the cash cow of assets it was more or less gifted from the public domain, and has been loath to increase capacity any more than absolutely necessary. The latest government, after reviewing the pathetic state of everything from landline and mobile pricing to broadband uptake and service levels, finally reinstituted regulation of Telecom and forced a split of the company into wholesale, retail and services divisions. In addition, it has mandated local loop unbundling for competitive DSL providers. Much of this is too little, too late, however, and the elephant in the room has been unacknowledged.
New Zealand has only one transoceanic fiber link to the rest of the world, and its operator, the Southern Cross Cable Network [southerncrosscables.com], is 50 percent owned by Telecom. The rates for international traffic on the SCCN reflect its monopoly status and appear to be governed by the doctrine of artificial scarcity. As a result, NZ ISPs have to be ultra stingy with bandwidth, forcing onerous data caps on business and retail customers and enforcing a two-tier pricing model on local and international traffic. Of course, in a nation with a land mass and population similar to the state of Colorado and an urgent need to be connected to global markets, this is criminally insane. But until competition [bizjournals.com] enters the picture or the government grows some balls, we're stuffed.