Ask HN: How to make browsing the web more 2G friendly?

[personalpicture]

I'm using the internet connection from my cell phone service, tethered for use with a laptop computer. The service is throttled to 2G speeds at the moment. What are some ways that I can make network throughput more streamlined to make navigating the web with 2G speeds more reasonable? Many desktop sites load very slow due to the multitude of files and hosts that it needs to get requests from. Sometimes there is no visible feedback for minutes. I feel like a "display of unstyled content" is reasonable for slower connections, because content is still king, not scripts. Also, I've been getting a lot of errors like timeout errors, and SPDY ping failures.

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I feel we may have crossed the Rubicon on this. 2G rings in my ears like "dial-up" Not saying the web needs everyone rocking gigabit (at least not yet), but I don't know that there is hope for 2G. I was working with a 3G device like just a little bit earlier today and I noticed it was 3G because it was already painful.

Depending on what you're doing, you try Brave or other adblocking solutions or a straight-up text-only browser which maybe could help.

[Artemix]

You can use pihole to block lots of websites on a DNS level, that's always a good first step.

Browser settings that should be done are: - disabling loading of external fonts - adding the ublock origin extension, priceless to "lighten" websites by removing as much crap as possible - aggressive resource caching, especially for CDN-based libraries

[PaulHoule]

It's dangerous to go alone. Take this:

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts