There are some situations where it may make sense to save as much bandwidth as possible while connected to the Internet . The most obvious is if you use a connection with a certain monthly or daily limit of internet traffic, after which you can no longer browse or you have to pay additional costs. This was the case with consumer connections of the past and today occurs with mobile internet subscriptions and with a USB stick (see also Costs and limits of mobile internet connections in Italy ). The second case where you may want to save bandwidth instead is to reduce the time it takes to load websites in the case of slow connections. This is the case when you connect in " tethering " or using the " hotspot " function of the smartphone which is transformed into a modem (see the guide on how to activate the hotspot on an iPhone that remains handy even on any smartphone Android Samsung, LG, HTC etc. and on Nokia with Windows Phone).
Using tathering is very useful for surfing the internet even from a tablet without a data connection or from a laptop when traveling or in places where a free and free wifi connection is not available. The problem is that if you connect to the internet from your computer using the mobile hotspot, the loading of websites in normal version (with all the animations, advertisements, images etc.) can be slow.
Furthermore, there is a risk of consuming the entire limited available bandwidth if you have a traffic-based data subscription.
Let's see how it can be done to open websites as quickly as possible, with minimal traffic and data exchange .
READ ALSO: Consume less internet data on 3G traffic (iPhone and Android)
1) Enable Click-to-play options
Many websites include embedded content (often video) that requires the use of external browser plugins such as Java and Flash.
This Flash content can be quite large and consume a lot of data and network traffic.
To prevent the loading of Flash content on the browser, you can use the click-to-play option that allows you to block its loading unless the user clicks on it. With click-to-play, the plugin will not run automatically.
In other articles, the instructions to enable click-to-play on Chrome and allow blocking plugins with click-to-play in Firefox.
It is also possible to allow plug-ins to run on some websites, allowing them to always upload content in Flash, java or Silverlight without asking for permission.
This can be useful for websites such as YouTube, although it is recommended to use low-quality video settings to consume less traffic and in case of slow or limited connection.
2) Turn off images
If you browse news or information sites, you may be able to disable image uploading, even if this option is decidedly drastic.
The images on the websites are often large and slow to load so, if the connection was very slow, perhaps it would be appropriate to disable the display.
Follow these instructions to prevent the browser from automatically uploading images:
- Chrome : open the Settings screen, go to advanced settings at the bottom, click on Content settings under Privacy and select Do not show images .
- Firefox : Open the Options window, click on the Content icon and uncheck Load images automatically .
- Internet Explorer : Open Internet Options and, on the Advanced tab, scroll to the Multimedia section and deselect Show images .
- Opera : Open the Preferences window, click on the Web Pages tab and select No Image in the Image Window.
3) Using data compression in Google Chrome is perhaps the best way to save network bandwidth in all respects, without giving up any content.
4) Use data compression in Chrome
In Google Chrome, data compression on PC, Android and iPhone can be activated in the options. The web pages you visit will be routed through Google's web proxies for optimization and it also works for HTTPS pages. The proxy compresses images and other parts of the site and returns them to the user in a compressed form, in order to consume less traffic or network bandwidth.
This mode is similar to what Opera Mini does on mobile phones.
5) Request the mobile version of the websites
Most websites (including Navigaweb.net) have a normal version and an optimized version for mobile phones which only reports the contents of the site without outlines, with less advertising and fewer images.
As written in another guide, you can see the mobile version of a website by changing User Agent on the browser, which is quite simple with Chrome and Firefox.
Sometimes the mobile version of a site works really well as in the case of Youtube and Facebook, while at other times it doesn't really work and it is the case of newspapers like Repubblica and Curre della Sera whose mobile versions are paid (therefore you need the contrary operation, see the normal version of the site on iPhone and Android phones).
6) Disabling automatic browser updates is advisable if you want to save bandwidth, so as not to run the risk that just at that moment when you connect your computer you will start to download the new version via the data connection of your mobile phone or USB stick.
For Chrome you need to follow the instructions in the guide;
For Firefox go to the Options, advanced tab, Update tab. Internet Explorer is updated from Windows Update (which would be to be disabled from the Control Panel). For Opera go to Preferences, Advanced tab, select Security and select the notification of new updates. I want to say that disabling automatic updates is a security risk so you must always reactivate them if you can access the internet with a normal connection.
7) Turn off Chrome pre-rendering or Firefox prefetching .
The Pre-rendering would be the immediate advance loading of the links in the Google Chrome browser which serves to speed up the connection by pre-loading the links of an open web page.
With Chrome you can open a new tab, write about: flags, press enter and then in the list of experimental functions, enable the Disable control of hyperlinks item .
In the privacy settings then disable the option Predict network actions to improve the performance of the page load .
With Firefox instead open a new tab, write about: config in the address bar and press the Enter key.
Look for the network.prefetch-next parameter and set it to false if it is true .
8) On Firefox and Chrome it is also necessary to disable the automatic synchronization of data which consumes bandwidth in the background.
On both browsers this function can be activated or deactivated in the options.
