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

No Script

[Coldeagle]

If you're a FireFox user I would recommend the No Script and adblock add on. That way you're not actually loading anything unless you specify.

Re:No Script

[93 Escort Wagon]

I suggest FlashBlock instead of NoScript if he only wants to stop flash from being auto-downloaded and leave the JS alone.

Agreed. I don't argue that NoScript isn't useful for some people; but for the average person it's too extreme of a solution. FlashBlock stops the vast majority of current web annoyances without requiring user intervention just to get the average site's navigation working.

Some may argue that for a site to require JavaScript for navigation is ridiculous; but we've got to deal with the real world here. Disabling all client-side scripting by default just breaks too many sites.

To quote Adam Savage:

[Weaselmancer]

At home, my internet connection is limited to 1GB / month before I have to pay extra.

"Well there's your problem."

Squid.

[bmo]

Install a cache server. Like Squid.

http://www.squid-cache.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_cache /thread.

--
BMO

Re:That's lousy

[teh moges]

For many uni students, $40/month isn't the sort of amount you want to be spending on non-necessary things like internet access.

Add that, the high cost of internet access at uni is a problem, even if the poster has good internet access at home. I'm in that situation: my home connection is great, but my uni has really low limits and high costs. This is fine when I can download something at home and bring it into uni, but if I go over my cap at uni, I can not browse anything at uni. This means I can't look up some papers or follow some links.

To the poster, I say, as first step, use No Script (as was said underneath). For you, the cost of whitelisting everything is less than the cost of the net. Also, don't "Always allow" if you can get away with it. If you always allow YouTube, you are back to the start again.

Re:That's lousy

[MoonBuggy]

I'm still amazed to hear that your university is charging you such a high rate for access (well, actually I'm surprised they're charging you at all for on-campus access); obviously connections differ depending on where you are, and the number of cables from New Zealand to the rest of the world has an impact on that, but having had a quick look around it seems that even a fairly pessimistic bit of number crunching at NZ prices has your university paying less than 1/10 of the cost they're passing on to you. Has anyone complained about this? Do they provide a reason for the inflated costs?