help with mobile broadband bandwidth

[nemesismk2]

Hi

I use Mobile broadband via a dongle (on a windows xp laptop) and i've noticed that my bandwidth useage is getting out of control. I use Firefox 16.02 and stick to the usual web pages which have not changed.

My first thought was i have a virus or trojan so I've checked my PC and it's virus free. My second thought was it must be flash player so i have disabled it so it's not downloading stuff.

Is there something i can enable to stop Firefox from using so much bandwidth?

I have tried using MSIE8 and found that browser doesn't use so much bandwidth like Firefox.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

My mobile broadband is 3G with Orange.

 

[Fardringle]

I don't have an answer specific to Firefox since mine uses very little bandwidth (unless I'm watching videos or streaming music) so I've never had a reason to tweak it, but you can use a program called NetBalancer to track the bandwidth usage of every program on the computer to determine what is using the connection.

 

[lxskllr]

What addons are you using? Adblock+ with the three fanboy lists should keep a lot of stuff from downloading.

 

[shadow_k]

Try Opera browser

 

[nemesismk2]

Try Opera browser

I am willing to try anything because using MSIE8 would be a poor alternative to using Firefox or Opera

 

[nemesismk2]

I don't have an answer specific to Firefox since mine uses very little bandwidth (unless I'm watching videos or streaming music) so I've never had a reason to tweak it, but you can use a program called NetBalancer to track the bandwidth usage of every program on the @#@#@#puter to determine what is using the connection@#@#

Thanks I will try Netbalancer to work out why i am using so much bandwidth

 

[nemesismk2]

What addons are you using? Adblock+ with the three fanboy lists should keep a lot of stuff from downloading.

I am not using any addons which is why i thought that flash player might of been the cause. I will give adblock+ a try

 

[lxskllr]

Try Opera browser

Opera has the "turbo" feature. What it does is compresses data on their servers so pages load faster, and you use less data. I found it crashy on Ubuntu, and there's privacy concerns, but that's an option if you're interested.

Edit:
Here's a couple image blockers for Firefox. I haven't used them myself, but they may help if they prevent the initial download. You can block images completely in preferences, but that would be inconvenient if you wanted to see the images. These will let you view them on a per-image basis. I like the looks of the Flash/image blocker myself, but as I said, I've tried neither...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-and-flash-blocker/?src=api

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-block/?src=search

 

[nemesismk2]

Opera has the "turbo" feature. What it does is compresses data on their servers so pages load faster, and you use less data. I found it crashy on Ubuntu, and there's privacy concerns, but that's an option if you're interested.

Edit:
Here's a couple image blockers for Firefox. I haven't used them myself, but they may help if they prevent the initial download. You can block images completely in preferences, but that would be inconvenient if you wanted to see the images. These will let you view them on a per-image basis. I like the looks of the Flash/image blocker myself, but as I said, I've tried neither...

My Mobile Broadband has a turbo feature which i have on max to save bandwidth so not sure if i would get any more saving from using Opera. Will give some of the image blockers a go though.

 

[nemesismk2]

All of my bandwidth problems started about a month ago about the time my mobile broadband provider stated offering 4G mobile broadband which i can't get because i live in the wilds so lucky to get 3G lol

I received a reply from Orange (now called EE) after i contacted them about my mobile broadband bandwidth problems and all they said was they know of the problem and it's because of 4G so that isn't much help