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

That's lousy

[Antony-Kyre]

Why would it be so bad in a day where technology should be so advanced?

What about disabling pictures/whatever in your Internet browser settings?

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

[Barryke]

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:That's lousy

[forrestm]

I should mention I'm in New Zealand, which unfortunately is behind most of the world in terms of internet

Re:That's lousy

[Laser_iCE]

That's practically the complete opposite of Australia. We are given monthly download limits (on most ISPs and adsl(2) connections), but are free to upload as much as we want. It's just such a shame that most Aussies are such leechers :(

Re:That's lousy

[buckyo]

If you're using Firefox, you can install Image-Show-Hide to toggle images on a page. Disabling/enabling images would then become a 1 click affair.

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?

Re:That's lousy

[Uber Banker]

Oh how times have changed. When in Imperial (1997, FK Hall in Southside, now raised to the ground and re-built, a great shame) we'd have 3 floors of rooms, 8 rooms per floor, around a central spiral staircase (there were 16 such staircase units, 8 across and two up, 8 coming off (above) the 1st floor communal area and 8 above the 5th floor communal area - this particular design was devised in the late 50s/early 60s and made rioting students easier to compartmentalise and contain the rioting, there were no riots but it made a really nice 'community' feel between the 23 fellow staircasers).

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

[billcopc]

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

OUT! Leave your geek card at the security desk.

How can you honestly call the internet "non-necessary" ? Yes, there's a lot of garbage on here, but how could any tech-savvy individual dismiss the evolutionary leap of the global information network ? Computers and the internet are the more significant achievements of our century, because they unlock a million other uses and are the first step toward unifying humankind.

What, you think all this man-vs-man, you-don't-know-what-I-know hate-breeding business is the path to enlightenment ? *cough* Wehell... thanks for nothing!

Re:That's lousy

[aliquis]

Same here, 2.5 cent / MB!?!

If he made me a list I could download the things for him, burn them and send the discs for less :D

I see that people have suggested large cache, I guess ad- and flashblocker are basic stuff to.. But uhm, I guess the web of today do require quite a lot of bandwidth duh to all the bloa.... uhm, web2.0 and flash ..

I wonder if I would really waste my precious 1 GB of data on crap like youtube if I had a cap. Uninstall flash, block all ads, block shitty iFrames, get a decent deal on the connection, .. :D

Re:That's lousy

[Gerzel]

Internet non-necessary... When was the last time you were in college?

Re:That's lousy

[shokk]

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

[vanDee28]

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

Re:That's lousy

[fedcb22]

True. But look at South Africa. We have 2x 120Gb/s cables, one linking us to Europe and one to Japan, yet we still have poor international speeds, and retarded international caps (~$7 for 1GB on ADSL)

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.

Re:That's lousy

[bwhaley]

Brett and Jermaine!

"Don't put me in der wit 'im! I'm innocent, i'm innocent! whuut?"

Re:That's lousy

[b4upoo]

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

[mudshark]

I'll add a little background here: In NZ, we are burdened by a regressive monopoly structure which has severely hampered our connectivity, both in country and internationally.

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) 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, 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 enters the picture or the government grows some balls, we're stuffed.

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

[NoobixCube]

I find No Script to be a bit of a pain, usually, because I seem to spend half of my time allowing things that I need. Adblock, however, is the only thing that keeps the internet usable for me when I exceed my download limit. I get shaped down to 56k instead of my usual 10 Mb/s - a very painful fall. Adblock lets me load pages in far less than half the time it would take without it. It's shocking how much crap is foisted on us at our own expense, really.

Re:No Script

[unlametheweak]

... because I seem to spend half of my time allowing things that I need...

You can either white list those "things that I need" or go to better Web sites. If you want Web 2.0 then you need a better connection. If you want to save bandwidth turn off all scripting and disallow iframes, meta-refreshes, plugins etc. Better yet use Lynx as people have already suggested. A Website that can't be viewed with Lynx is a Web site not worth visiting.

Re:No Script

[aug24]

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

Justin.

Re:No Script

[Koiu Lpoi]

Your "usual list of sites"? How long is it? Just whitelist the lot of them and be done with it, unless we're talking hundreds of them, which is a bit strange. It's really quite easy.

Re:No Script

[Jurily]

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: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.

Re:No Script

[unlametheweak]

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?

I don't know what University you go to. One university I was thinking of going to (when I was just a teeny-bopper) offered me a partial scholarship but I turned them down because of the very poor customer service. I would have probably done the same with your university. If you've already committed yourself financially then you can always try to ask for a refund or a transfer. I'm sorry to hear about your school. You should complain to the student union about this absurdity.

Re:No Script

[houghi]

And if you are not a Firefox user. Become one.

Some extra things you can do on top of most other things
1) http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm will block out many things without even trying to fetch them.
2) Use privoxy or junkbuster
3) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1672 ImgLikeOpera This extension is very useful for non broadband users
4) If you have more then 1 PC, install a proxy server. Or perhaps using your providers proxy server won't count for as much (a long shot, but worth ti check out)
5) Use a webinterface for your mail without too many adds, like Gmail.
6) Read /. with the "Low Bandwith", simple design and such set
7) Use Lynx, links or w3m to browse most sites and only use firefox for those that actually need it.

Do use all of the things, not just one or two. Only when they conflict yiu need to choose.

Re:No Script

[kayditty]

I use both noscript and flashblock. flashblock handles youtube videos and such much better than noscript ever could, because the DOM still loads and doesn't require a page reload. I just have to click on the icon. not only that, but flashblock works on a per-object basis, so that I can load up as many youtube tabs as I want without having 25 videos trying to play at once. I much prefer that than to have youtube videos load as soon as I open them, and that seems like that would be quite useful for this guy as well.

Re:No Script

[Peet42]

And don't forget the wonder that is "Flashblock". That will stop your YouTube movies and other Flash content from loading until you explicitly click on them, so no more "driveby" bandwidth wastage.

Re:No Script

[phoenix321]

Tip: focus on "accessibility for handicapped" as the main theme. Papers on these topics get higher grades and a higher chance of anyone actually caring.

Re:No Script

[forrestm]

OK here is how much my uni charges: http://www.icts.canterbury.ac.nz/services/charges/index7.shtml

Re:No Script

[Sancho]

I think the guy is doing something wrong. I use NoScript all the time, and I've whitelisted probably 3 sites permanently. The rest I whitelist on a case-by-case basis, as I'm concerned about XSS (and while NoScript claims to protect against XSS and CSRF, but I don't like to take chances.) I have about 70 RSS feeds, many of which are blogs which point to external links, so yeah, I probably visit 100s of sites.

As you say, most work just fine without Javascript. Those that do lose functionality, I often don't care about that functionality (gawker sites require Javascript to view any comments--but I don't care about comments on those sites.) A very few provide useful Javascript, or were coded such that it's necessary, and I'll enable it on those for as long as I am using the site.

It's not cumbersome. It's trivial. The only problem is when a site loads script from many, many sources, and it may take a while to narrow down which site provides script for the functionality I need. Once I've figured that out, though, it's pretty easy to do again.

Re:No Script

[BronsCon]

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.

Use Squid

[pembo13]

Setup Squid with bandwidth limits as you see fit.

Here you go

[dgun]

http://lynx.isc.org/

Re:Here you go

[Skater]

Or Links. Far better than Lynx.

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."

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[Eythian]

It is the standard in that it's the base-level cap. It works well enough for people who read a few webpages and get their email. A number of friends, and my parents are on that. Heavier users can quite happily get more, although it does get a bit pricier. I put my plan up to 100Gb the other day, and it costs NZ$95/mo.

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:To quote Adam Savage:

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two kinds of problems in this world:
Those you can do something about, and those you can not.

Soulskill did not say so, but I am willing to bet he is from South Africa (as I am). I will therefore answer in this context, if the context is wrong, apologies.

The 1Gb limit is fairly typical as is the charging per bandwidth by your university. Even if you go to the library, you still have to log in and you are charged.

The reasons for this are numerous (and I am not going to claim that I can give a fair analysis in such a short space) but it includes the facts that
* South Africa get's its international connectivity from the States and Europe. So there are seriously long cables that run to serve RELATIVELY small population of internet users.
* There is an effective monopoly (or by now duopoly) on bandwidth provision (and yes, this is being fought)
* South Africa (and most other third world countries) needs to pay for it connectivity to other countries (but why not the other way around?)

This landscape is changing, extra cables are being laid under sea, SLOWLY the market is being deregulated so we can look forward to some cheaper bandwidth in future. In the meantime, these are the cards we are being dealt.

So before giving an answer as simplistic as this (and being marked insightful 5!!!!) consider that the world is larger.

I hope this does add insight.

Flame away.

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[ScrewMaster]

It's not like I'm in the States and too stupid to realize things might be done differently elsewhere.

You, on the other hand, might want to realize that there are a whole lot of Americans on this US-based Web site. Furthermore, we're well aware of the rest of the world, thank you very much. We don't care all that much about it, but we're certainly aware of it. So, enough with the automatic anti-American sentiments. Most of us here are American, and if you'd like this dialog to remain civil, tone it down a little.

I understand that the popular idea among many people of other countries is that Americans make good verbal punching bags, but frankly, it just makes you seem uncivilized.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Squid.

[bmo]

Install a cache server. Like Squid.

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

--
BMO

Re:Squid.

[grasshoppa]

Which actually doesn't help the youtube problem. Squid can't cache youtube videos. You'd think it'd be able to, I would expect it to, but it doesn't.

Re:Squid.

[whoever57]

Install a cache server. Like Squid.

Judging by my squid analysis (using Calamaris), Squid will only save about 10% of a small network's bandwidth -- even if it is setup with a reasonably large (5GB) cache and a large size (100MB) for the maximum size of cached objects.

Re:Squid.

[unlametheweak]

Something like "Downloadhelper is good for Youtube. It's a Firefox extension. You don't need Javascript or flash enabled to use it. Just download the video and watch it as many times as you want. I know there are other programs like this, but this one is actually up-todate and simple to use.

Re:Squid.

[cryptoluddite]

I like polipo. 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:Squid.

[bobv-pillars-net]

It is *possible* to cache YouTube videos and the like, but you'd need some technical skill to pull it off. Basically, you'd write a Squid pre-filter that replaces embedded YouTube videos with an embedded call to a local cgi-script. On the first invocation, the cgi-script would download and cache the video while streaming it to the client. Subsequent calls would skip the download process.

Of course, this only saves bandwidth when you re-watch the same video over-and-over.

Even in the pre-YouTube days of the internet, Squid didn't help with bandwidth all that much. I once set up a Squid cache in transparent-proxy mode at an ISP with around 400 dial-up customers. I gave it 4 GB of cache space, which doesn't sound like much now, but our biggest drives were 500mb full-height SCSI bricks. I tuned every configurable option and pulled every trick in the book to maximize the caching. The experiment lasted around a month, during which time Squid saved us around 30% on our inbound bandwidth, according to log analysis. We finally had to shut it down because customers started to notice that they weren't seeing real-time data (like stock quotes) and some of them threatened to sue.

Bottom line: If you want low-bandwidth internet, use one of the these:

Lynx

Links

ELinks

w3m

hosts file

[JetScootr]

About 100 ad domains eat up most bandwidth if you're using the most popular sites. Put those 100 domains into your hosts file pointed at '127.0.0.1' and eliminate half or more of the bandwidth used by normal surfing at cnn.com, yahoo.com, etc. Google it - there's a site out there that has a huge hosts file you can download; it's overkill - you really only need about 200 max. Just keep checking where your unwanted cookies are coming from, and null those sites.

Firefox connections

[Anonymous Coward]

When in doubt, consult the source.
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+makes+unrequested+connections

Re:One word!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing. Yours is the 3rd lynx reference posted within one minute!

There needs to be karma-neutral way to mod posts redundant.

Library

[DeadDecoy]

Go to the library?
Seriously, if you're at a University, or hell, any community, you should have a library which usually has some kind of internet connection. And you don't have to worry about being charged some arbitrary amount per MB. : /

Re:Library

[j-beda]

In most universities I am familiar with in North America, computer access wireless or wired required a signon with your university network-ID and password. Thus bandwidth tracking is certainly possible. If the poster is in a place with high data-transmission costs (such as New Zealand or basically anywhere outside of NAmerica, Europe and parts of Asia) it seems likely that they would implement this type of thing.

What would be nice is if they had a large caching system on the local university network (which seems likely) and that they didn't charge students for access to any local (within the local network) system access, which seems much more difficult to track and "bill" so likely is not done.

make believe you are a cell phone

[circletimessquare]

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

A wifi card and your neighbour's internet.

[jamonterrell]

I'm thinking that's your best bet.

Re:easy

[i'm lost]

Does flashblock do anything that noscript doesn't do?

Disable prefetching

[mj01nir]

Disable prefetching.
about:config
network.prefetch-next false

Re:Disable prefetching

[Frozen Void]

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:Disable prefetching

[WK2]

From https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ:

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.

Some Firefox suggestions

[gregbaker]

I have a couple of suggestions for Firefox...

Don't load images: Preferences -> Content and uncheck "Load images automatically".

Block other media you don't want: FlashBlock, AdBlock, QuickJava (for Java and JavaScript)

You could also try fiddling with the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency in your about:config. I haven't tried it, but setting it to 2 might yield good results.

Try a compressing proxy

[keeboo]

If you have access to a remote server which do not have bandwidth limitations (perhaps a friendly sysadmin in an university?) you may try a compressing proxy such as Ziproxy which recompresses pictures to lower quality and does some extra black magic aswell.

It seems that RabbIT does that too, but I've never used that software myself.

Four ways

[Leemeng]

1. Adblock Plus (not plain Adblock)

2. FlashBlock

3. Modified Hosts file (http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm)

4. If you need to watch a Youtube vid more than once, you can download it to your PC via keepvid.com.

Use Opera

[A Friendly Troll]

Nobody suggested this yet, so I will:

Use Opera.

One of its really great features is the ability to browse the web with image loading turned off, either completely, or just by allowing already-cached images to be displayed. Ever ended up on a random forum while googling something and had half a dozen megabytes of flashy avatars and signatures loaded, plus someone embedding giant images into the thread? I have. Image loading toggle is a keypress or a mouse click away.

If you globally turn JavaScript and plugins off, you won't be surprised by a site loading a megabyte of JS from somewhere (damn those huge libraries), or by any kind of Flash content or embedded videos. Helps security, too. You can always whitelist sites you regularly use.

The third great thing about Opera is instant Back/Forward navigation. Nothing is reloaded. Extra bandwidth savings. Extra time savings, too, with mouse gestures.

Firefox's search bar

[fahrbot-bot]

When I begin to enter a search in Firefox's search bar, a list of suggestions is automatically downloaded.

Turn this feature off. Click on the downarrow to the left of the search box, select "Manage Search Engines" and de-select "Show search suggestions".

You can also disable this (annoying) feature for Google page searches from their Preferences page. This sets "SG=0" in the Google PREF cookie -- which I've set in my proxy server so it's effectively disabled for all my browsers.

WTF!?!?!

[rts008]

Dude, all you have to do when visiting a site to be white-listed is is :
1. visit the site.
2. navigate your curser to the 'S' with the red circle and slash (in the bottom right corner of FF), and choose "allow this page". If you have not set NoScript to refresh the page withe new settings (Windows= 'tools'> Add-ons> highlight (left-click/hover on NoScript in the 'add-ons' dialog box) NoScript, click on the 'Options' button> select 'General' tab> checkmark the box labeled 'Automatically reload affected pages when permissions change.'

3. ???

4. PROFIT!!!

For extra credit,try the "appearance' tab (Tools>Add-ons>NoScript>Options.

Personally, mine is set at:

(long story, short version) "Show..."
"Status bar labeled" == unchecked
"Full Domain" == unchecked
"Full Address" == unchecked

It provides a nice experience online for me, along with control over which parts of a web page can load.

When in doubt, you can always try "temporarily allow XYZ.org/com/net/edu".

P.S. I am currently having to settle for a Windows machine against my choice, but the above info is the same under Linux and Firefox, except it is accessed from "Edit">"Preferences">....

Re:easy

[WK2]

Use adblockplus rather than adblock. Adblock is obsolete, and does not work with current Firefox versions.

Here are some bandwidth saving keys to add to your user.js file:
---- // Don't submit every character I type in the search box to google
user_pref("browser.search.suggest.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.search.update", false); // Update extensions and Adblock filters every 15 days.
user_pref("extensions.update.interval", 1296000);
user_pref("extensions.adblockplus.synchronizationinterval", 360); // Note that the first is measured in seconds, and the second is measured in hours. // Block pages from autorefreshing
user_pref("accessibility.blockautorefresh", true);

---

Leave youtube videos loaded in the tab until you are sure you won't want to watch it again. I typically turn the sound off and allow a youtube video to load while I am surfing in another tab. When the video is done loading, I turn the sound back on and watch it from the beginning.

That is an insane download cap

[MartinSchou]

1 GB/month may SOUND like a lot, but it really isn't.
Your 1 GB/month alocation would be eaten up if you have some task in the background soaking up 3.2 kb/second in bandwidth. That's how rediculously small that amount is.

33.6 kbit/second constant load on your connection would add up to 10.5 GB/month
Slashdot's frontpage alone is 630 kB. 3 visits a day for a month takes up 55 MB
New York Times' frontpage is 830 kB. 3 visits a day for a month takes up 72 MB
TVGuide.com isn't much better at 720 kB.
The basic view of gmail takes up 62 kB. The standard view is 630 kB.
It would be impossible for you to download the latest WoW patch.
I've no clue how much Windows Update requires, but Vista's Service Pack 1 is 435MB, XP SP 3 is 316MB.
MS Office 2007 Service Pack 1 is 218 MB.
Back in 2003 the average email was about 59
kilobytes in size. Spam comprises some 80 to 85% of all the email in the world, by conservative estimate, so if you're only getting 2 actual emails a day, you'll be getting 8 spam messages. This gives you a total of 17 MB/month (if you're downloading everything).

Today, all I've done for the last three hours on my computer is browse techsites and played Second Life - the totals here are 21MB up, 314 down for a total of 335 MB data. In three hours. Sounds like a lot but that's "only" 254 kb/second - pretty much the slowest ADSL connection you can get.

Forgot about listening to internet radio. 1 hour a day at 64 kbit/second is 824 MB in a month.

A standard ping packet is 32 bytes. 1 ping/second takes eats 80 MB/month.

Basicly what I'm saying is - you're fucked. A 1 GB/month usage cap is fucked up, too small and ridiculous.

To give you an idea of HOW ridiculous it is, In Denmark (25% sales tax) I can buy a 3G modem, subscription included for 6 months for 355 US$. This has no caps at all. Maximum speed is 7.2 Mbit/s, expected claimed average is between 2 and 3 Mbit/s. Every month after that the subscription is 51 US$. Roaming in Sweden is free of charge as well.

populate a HOSTS file, honey

[Anonymous Coward]

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:easy

[secolactico]

Leave youtube videos loaded in the tab until you are sure you won't want to watch it again. I typically turn the sound off and allow a youtube video to load while I am surfing in another tab. When the video is done loading, I turn the sound back on and watch it from the beginning.

Or you can hit pause, switch to another window/tab and it will continue to load. When done, unpause.

Re:Sorry

[Jesus_666]

That only works if someone actually offers something better. If the OP sits in Australia or New Zealand a 10 GB limit might be the best offer he can afford.

Windows and Tabs

[Codex_of_Wisdom]

As for the YouTube issue. If you plan to go back to a site (like the Slashdot main page after reading an article), open the links in a new window or tab, that way you just have to close the win/tab and not reload the previous page.

RSS-alternatively

[Jerry Smith]

RSS is a great way to help reduce bandwidth waste and a great way to read the news. I love RSS. I find having a program with all of my news feeds together is much more efficient for me than looking at the ten or so sites separately. It also has features like a quick search and allows me to read the news on my laptop when I don't have a net connection.

My suggestions for good and free clients are:

Windows: Feed Demon OS X: Vienna

Not only are they great readers, but they also support CSS-Styled views...I can't stand RSS readers that look and behave like email clients.

Oops, you missed out Liferea (Linux). BUT (and thats one big BUT) though both Vienna and Liferea support browser-like eerm.. browsing (via the address-bar), a lot of rss-readers do not have the ability to block adverts by means of plugins or addons. Liferea offers the about:config, but I'm not sure how Vienna could handle this. I'd use an rss-reader only (in this handicapped internet situation) that downloads ONLY the full text, and nothing more.

Use filtering and caching proxies

[John.Thompson]

You can run a caching proxy (e.g. "squid") on your computer to prevent re-fetching pages you've already fetched, and chain it to a filtering proxy (e.g. "privoxy") to block downloading of large but superfluous stuff like advertisements. If you're not already using Firefox, you might consider trying it, and installing the NoScript and/or Flashblock extensions to give you control over Flash, Java and other downloads that might otherwise automatically happen whether you actually want them or not.