[aklug] saving bandwidth on metered Internet (was: Re: I'm an Android)

Bruce Hill wrote, on 7/22/2010 5:50 PM:
> Here in the poor world we're presently on a plan with 240 mins/month and
> 300MB data for $14.86 USD. Incoming calls are free on all plans. And we
> can call America directly from the iPhone for about 9c USD ... not bad,
> especially considering that with a good signal here, the quality exceeds
> that of our land line.

A side note for those of you in similar circumstances: expensive or
low-bandwidth connections. A great way to conserve *lots* of Firefox
bandwidth is the ImgLikeOpera extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1672/

I discovered ImgLikeOpera when researching the issue for some friends on
metered Internet in South Africa. For those of you who regularly use
Opera (hi, Tom!), this won't be news. :-)

Basically, ImgLikeOpera lets you decide, on a per-site and per-tab
basis, whether or not you want to have images automatically loaded. A
little icon sits in your status bar, and when you click it, it cycles
through the following options (defaulting to whatever you specify):

* Don't load images
* Load cached images only
* Load images for this site only
* Load all images

The little icon changes so you can tell what setting you're on. You can
set a default for new tabs and windows. I set mine to "Don't load images."

Many sites are full of eye candy that isn't actually needed for the site
to operate, but some sites need images for basic functionality. Some
don't provide "alt" tags for their buttons; others have formatting
issues. If anything is borked, you can just click that button in the
tray, and you're in business.

ImgLikeOpera isn't marked yet to work under Firefox 3.6.x, but it really
does. Just use the Add-on Compatibility Reporter or Mr Tech extensions
to disable compat checking. (You can also do this with about:config,
but I recommend installing both if you haven't already).

I love ImgLikeOpera. It saves a ton of bandwidth (not relative to P2P
or downloading ISOs, but you get the idea). It also makes many sites
much less distracting and faster. I even use it at work where bandwidth
is not much of an issue. :-) Add FlashBlock to the mix for more savings.

Royce
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Received on Fri Jul 23 12:17:18 2010