Web browser that consumes minimum data

Question

I currently use Ubuntu 14.04 as primary OS and Windows XP as secondary OS.

I am using Mozilla Firefox & sometimes Chromium web browsers. Now I want a web browser that consumes less (minimum) [online] data for viewing pages. (I want to use that as a secondary browser)

• Flash not required
• 'Extra' plugins (eg. downloader, pdf viewer, adobe plugins) not required
• Add-ons/extensions not required
• Only for simple surfing, so the browser consumes minimum data for viewing/surfing webpages. (may compress data)

In brief If I want to surf fully supported, then I will use Firefox/Chrome.
But I want above mentioned web-browser (no advance facilities but only simple formatting) that can view pages with the best possible effort and which consumes as little data as possible.

Answer 1

You could hardmode it and use w3m or lynx. I hear emacs has a browser now too, but I'm not sure if it's usable.

Lynx' advantages:

• Intuitive, text-only browsing
• No Flash
• No plugins
• No images
• No JavaScript
• You get warned about IFRAME's and redirections.

w3m is close in functionality but navigation keys are a bit different, and it can display images via imlib2.

Answer 2

You can try Opera. It has a feature called Opera Turbo which basically takes the requested page, compresses it using Opera's servers and sends it back to your computer which minimizes bandwidth and loading times. Aside from that, Opera is pretty much your standard browser. They seem to mainly focus on speed and low bandwidth consumption making for a great alternative browser

Features:

• Minimizes bandwidth usage by compressing data through Opera's servers
• Plugin (extensions) and theme support
• Private browsing and other security options (such as do not track)
• Developer tools and console
• Pretty much every feature you would expect from a modern web browser (bookmarks, syncing, easy to navigate menus etc)
• Cross platform (including mobile versions)
• And many more!

Here is a video preview of the browser.

Answer 3

You could try the RequestPolicy Continued addon for Firefox. It is an extension that prevents pages from loading resources from external sites.

For example this page loads resources from ajax.googleapis.com, gravatar.com, sstatic.net and imgur.com, which are blocked by RequestPolicy before they are loaded (unless you explicitely allow them). This has privacy advantages and makes pages load faster, using less bandwidth. Combine this with an ad blocker like AdblockPlus for maximum efficiency.

Edit, 6 years after: RequestPolicy Continued is now mostly abandoned, you can achieve similar results with Ublock Origin in Hard Mode

Answer 4

Here is a nice summary of the situation:

Using a local(!) plugin to reduce image size and quality requires you to first download the large version. Thus you can not reduce bandwidth usage this way.

The only way to use less bandwidth is if:

1. Someone else downloads it all, then reduces the size and you download the smaller images. (Some networks do this when you tether a mobile phone to your desktop)
2. If the site offering the images also offers smaller images.
3. You turn off image loading in a graphical browser, or
4. You use a text only browser such as lynx, links or w3m.
5. (See nodisc's answer)

If you want to go with the first point, you can either set up a proxy yourself, or for free you can use Turbo with Opera as aman207 mentioned, and there is also Google's Data Compression Proxy but only available for Android so far:

Google's proxy is faster than Opera Mobile's Turbo feature, while saving almost the same amount of data. For example, the savings for AnandTech.com were 48.9%, while Opera Mobile Turbo's data savings were 50%. The savings for apple.com were 60.3%, while Opera Mobile Turbo's data savings were 57%. Chrome's major advantage is that the proxy doesn't slow down browsing, unlike Opera Mobile.

Google says that "this feature has been shown to reduce data usage by 50% and speed up page load times on cellular networks. When the Data Compression Proxy feature is enabled, Chrome mobile opens a dedicated SPDY connection between your phone and one of the optimization servers running in Google's datacenters and relays all HTTP requests over this connection. (...) The browser-to-proxy connection runs over SSL, meaning that your browsing session is encrypted between your device and Google's servers." HTTPS connections and pages loaded in the incognito mode don't use the proxy. DNS lookups are performed by the proxy, while the images are converted to WebP and the resulting images are up to 80% smaller. "The proxy also performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, which removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other metadata which are not essential to render the page. These optimizations, combined with mandatory gzip compression for all resources, can result in substantial bandwidth savings."

If you are willing to pay for a data compression proxy, you might want to have a look at

• Toonel (pretty old though)
• Fastun: web accelerating service for Firefox and Opera

Some more details for Fastun:

• Compress HTTP traffic using the GZIP algorithm
• Optimize web pages code (HTTP/CSS), thus reducing their size
• Compress images in PNG, GIF and JPEG formats with a feature of quality choice

In order to use fasTun you have to register for an account. You can either register for free or premium account.

I guess there might be other such services.

Answer 5

gngr

You can control what type of additional requests are made for each website. By default only css and images are loaded (and you can turn that off as well).