Toggle-able plugins for keeping data usage low?

[CZroe]

I use my notebook at home and at work. I need to tether my devices at work to a device with only 3GB per billing cycle before it is throttled excessively. I tried common sense browsing, like not going to image, video, or ad-heavy pages. I installed Ad Block Plus for no other reason than I needed to save on the bandwidth (sorry, Anandtech). I began using the "watch later" and offline caching features of YouTube. None of this is enough. I'm rocketing through way too much data way too fast.

What browser plugins other than ABP have good bandwidth-saving features? I'd prefer features that I can toggle on and off when I am on and off tethered data sources.

For example, I'd like to stop YouTube from auto-playing. I'd like to stop Flash objects from even loading until I click a placeholder object. I'd like to block images with placeholder objects so that I can load them on demand with an exclusion list that always allows certain images to load. I'd like to save articles for offline viewing. I'd like to preload all my unread forum thread subscriptions in different tabs when I'm at home and peruse them at my leisure when I am on mobile data. I'd then like to not lose my reply when I forget to copy, refresh, then paste my reply later that night (session/token times out).

I can go on. There are a million little things I can think of that would make a drastic improvement if automated. Are there any plugins out there to help with these things? Any other good ones that I am missing? I should probably use a portable version of a browser configured for bandwidth savings and another for my regular home usage, so I'm not opposed to selecting whichever has the best suite of data-saving plugins.

Now, I'm not really bandwidth restricted until I get throttled at 3GB so I'm not looking at bandwidth-saving tweaks with the intent of speeding things up, although it often goes hand-in-hand. Any suggestions?

 

[jpiniero]

ABP is a good start. There are various click to play flash plugins you could download.

The other big thing is to prevent Windows updates from happening, and also any apps with spyware updaters like Chrome.

 

[lxskllr]

You might get some ideas here...

https://pay.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/16gujg/minimizing_mobile_data_usage_ie_living_under_a/

 

[CZroe]

Thanks. Already finding a ton of great ideas.

 

[sm625]

I cant even say for sure that ABP actually prevents the downloading of ads. Has anyone actually verified that those blocked ads arent still being downloaded?

 

[lxskllr]

I cant even say for sure that ABP actually prevents the downloading of ads. Has anyone actually verified that those blocked ads arent still being downloaded?

Everything I've read implies they're blocked from being downloaded(on Firefox). I'm not sure how to quickly verify that behavior without checking the source code.

Assuming it does block download, wildcard filters could be setup to block all images from all sites, and then set your preferences to show a placeholder for the images. That would give finer grained control over image viewing, but it would likely slow down browsing due to the complicated filters. I'd check it, and see if the performance is acceptable. You could test the download theory that way also. Go to an image heavy site, and try it with and without the image filters being active, and see how much data is transferred.

Edit:
See this thread for blocking images. It gives a method that doesn't affect performance too badly...

https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12044

 

[sm625]

I just checked firefox using 10 common sites' home pages (amazon, youtube, tumblr, netflix, yahoo, msn, NYT, flickr, imdb, etc). The size of my firefox profile grows from 2MB to 26MB just from opening these sites' home pages! With or without adblock that is an outrageous amount of crap! Adblock makes literally zero difference. Yes, I emptied my profile cache folder between tests.

Adding a filter to block all jpg reduced the size to 15MB. That is a 50% reduction in crap, but obviously that still leaves a lot of crap.

When I add .png, .bmp, .jpeg, .tif, .tiff, .gif to the filter the size drops to 11MB. So that is about 9MB of non-image related garbage, just from 9 home pages. (MSN wont even load with these filters so I dont count that one.)

Filtering out .js files reduces the size to 8MB.

Note that flickr still loads a bunch of pictures even with all these image filters. Only disabling javascripts will get rid of the images on flickr.

 

[lxskllr]

I just checked firefox using 10 common sites' home pages (amazon, youtube, tumblr, netflix, yahoo, msn, NYT, flickr, imdb, etc). The size of my firefox profile grows from 2MB to 26MB just from opening these sites' home pages! With or without adblock that is an outrageous amount of crap! Adblock makes literally zero difference. Yes, I emptied my profile cache folder between tests.

Adding a filter to block all jpg reduced the size to 15MB. That is a 50% reduction in crap, but obviously that still leaves a lot of crap.

Did you block images, or just ads? Ads don't usually take a tremendous amount of room. Blocking them usually makes things faster because you aren't waiting on laggy adservers.

Edit:
I see your edit. That's not a bad reduction. Using NoScript to block the other stuff should lean things out pretty nicely. Btw, I'd use Fanboys Ultimate list. It blocks a lot of social networking crap, and trackers, so it should reduce the weight even further.

https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/filters.html

 

[sm625]

Wow Fanboy's list cut the size of my profile folder from 26MB to 20MB. (After opening 10 common tabs and scrolling thru each one in series twice.) I guess it really is better than easylist.