Hey Tom, I second that request, although I wonder whether the browser is the best place to put this. I'd be tempted to put something nearer the connection itself (a proxy of sorts) that can traffic shape.
For instance, I find it worrying at times that Firefox and many other programs auto-check for updates and in some cases automatically download new versions. Although this is terribly irritating (and costly) on mobile internet, I am happy for it to go on while I'm at home.
In this case, I would expect the magical filtering program to prevent, throttle, or otherwise warn about these goings on.
Such a program could (I presume) act as a proxy to block unnecessary junk to save on precious bytes (only show images when prompted; block flash, etc)
Perhaps with a server-side companion it could also heavily compress images, HTML and other media before sending it over the pipe - a la Google Web Accelerator; Opera Mini (I think) and the server-side compressing done by Vodafone, etc.
- Sven
There are some extensions to change your User Agent String to pretend you're on some mobile device and WebDeveloper allows you to disable CSS and Javascript (and even images) so you can try something like that.
Another option is using Google Web Accelerator as Sven mentioned. Pages will be ugly as hell, but you'll reduce a lot of bandwidth.
2008-04-07EDT16:50:22+00:00
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Another option is using Google Web Accelerator as Sven mentioned. Pages will be ugly as hell, but you'll reduce a lot of bandwidth.
I can do each component manually - turn on JavaScript and enable/disable Greasemonkey scripts and Stylish styles - but really I want to bundle all that together with a big 'off' switch so that I can turn them all on or off at once.
2008-04-07EDT18:06:10+00:00
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I use the free Opera browser a lot. You can with keyboard shortcuts easily turn all images off, or on, or just show already cached images. F12 can stop various plugins from being used as well.
Also as above, make sure you don't have apps like Firefox or Windows Updater (maybe even AV sw) download stuff in the background. Many apps will try to check if an update it available. That's probably just a few K but if they auto-download then that can be many MB. So to stop all you could get your firewall to temporarily block everything but your browser.
2008-05-03EDT08:39:03+00:00
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Also as above, make sure you don't have apps like Firefox or Windows Updater (maybe even AV sw) download stuff in the background. Many apps will try to check if an update it available. That's probably just a few K but if they auto-download then that can be many MB. So to stop all you could get your firewall to temporarily block everything but your browser.
