Configuring Firefox / Chrome for very slow and limited Internet

  • Tutorial
Let's try to make, for example, a Firefox browser that will be useful when you have very expensive traffic, or very low Internet speed, and you urgently need to shovel a bunch of textual information in a minimally readable form, of course, without Javascript. To do this, we will make a separate Firefox profile for a rainy day. This approach should work for Chrome as well, because the plugin uses the same one for cutting traffic.

For comparison - in this mode, the article loads consuming 106 KB of traffic, while in normal mode, Firefox spends about 6.3 MB of traffic to load and display the same page. At the same time, the content as a whole is readable, although it depends on the specific site.

First, create a new Firefox user profile. To do this, in the address bar of Firefox, type about: profiles and press Enter. There create a profile with the desired name, for example low-internet. Then you can create a shortcut for windows or a bash script for Linux to launch Firefox immediately in traffic saving mode. To do this, add the -p parameter and the profile name after it, for example firefox -p low-internet.

Next we put the uBlock Origin plugin . In its settings in the tab 'Settings' we tick opposite:

  • Block remote fonts
  • Disable JavaScript
  • Block media elements larger than kB

In the latter case, we also indicate a small value of type 1 kb.

Then in the settings of the plugin go to the 'My filters' section, and insert the following lines there:

||*/*.bmp
||*/*.bmp?=*
||*/*.eot
||*/*.eot?=*
||*/*.font
||*/*.font?=*
||*/*.gif
||*/*.gif?=*
||*/*.ico
||*/*.ico?=*
||*/*.jpeg
||*/*.jpeg?=*
||*/*.jpg
||*/*.jpg?=*
||*/*.js
||*/*.js?=*
||*/*.mp3
||*/*.mp3?=*
||*/*.mp4
||*/*.mp4?=*
||*/*.png
||*/*.png?=*
||*/*.svg
||*/*.svg?=*
||*/*.swf
||*/*.swf?=*
||*/*.ttf
||*/*.ttf?=*
||*/*.wav
||*/*.wav?=*
||*/*.webm
||*/*.webm?=*
||*/*.webp
||*/*.webp?=*
||*/*.woff
||*/*.woff2=*
||*/*.woff2
||*/*.woff2?=*
||youtube.com*
||gstatic.com*

And click 'Apply Changes'. These rules will block the download of any files other than html and css by the browser. The last line is needed because without it, files with the above extensions are still loaded from the Google CDN, and it is now registered on every second site. YouTube is blocked due to the fact that in the case of inserting links to YouTube in the document, requests go to him.

Your additions to the rules for popular CDNs, things that are embedded via the iframe, as well as the types of media files that I forgot are welcome. And also a way to disable the white list of uBlock Origin sites so that you do not need to block some domains, such as gstatic, manually.

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