Browsing Frugally Without Wasting Bandwidth?

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?"

Comments

A wifi card and your neighbour's internet.

[jamonterrell]

I'm thinking that's your best bet.

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair he could be in a third world nation where that is actually the top teir plan.

You're using Telstra BigPond in Australia, aren't you? Sigh.

Re:That's lousy

[vanDee28]

Actually, computers and the internet are the more significant achievements of the PREVIOUS century ;)

Re:That's lousy

[Lord Ender]

For university students today, internet access falls between beer and food on the scale of necessities. If you have $100/month to spend, you would use the first $40 for Natural Light, the next $40 for access to Facebook, and the remaining $20 for Ramen Noodles.