Browsing frugally without wasting bandwidth?

Browsing frugally without wasting bandwidth? 0

Submitted by forrestm on Thursday October 23 2008, @05:58PM

forrestm writes "At home, my internet connection is limited to 1GB / month before I have to pay extra. At university, I am charged around 2.5c per megabyte. I rarely download anything big, but I often go through a large amount of bandwidth by just 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, for example BoingBoing.net or Cnet.com, in my status bar I see a whole lot of data being transfered through other domains. Some pages seem to send/recieve 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?"

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