Methods to Lighten Your Knowledge Load

TECH TIP

A browser that’s set to compress or block pictures, advertisements and different bandwidth-hogging components of an online web page can prevent megabytes.

Q. I dwell in a rural space with an especially gradual, metered connection and restricted web bandwidth. I largely use the net on my laptop to learn information articles, so is there a strategy to block all the pieces besides the textual content from downloading to avoid wasting megabytes?

A. Mostly used browsers — together with Google Chrome. Microsoft Web Explorer and Mozilla Firefox — have a setting that means that you can disable picture recordsdata from loading with an online web page. Once you activate the Develop menu within the Preferences of Apple’s Safari browser, you get a Disable Photos choice.

If you happen to don’t care to wade round in settings and configurations recordsdata, you'll be able to in all probability discover a third-party add-on to dam (or enable, on demand) pictures, movies and different visible content material. To attenuate the time and megabytes spent on-line, some folks even use a browser’s “reader” mode to chop and paste textual content right into a word-processing doc for studying or printing later, or bookmark pages for offline studying later.

PictureOpera, like many different browsers, may be set to cease pictures on a web page from loading.Credit scoreThe New York Instances

For these wishing to avoid wasting bandwidth and battery, the desktop Opera browser has some appealing built-in features, and the option to block images is easily found in the program’s settings. If you want to keep pictures loading but reduce the amount of data consumed, Opera has a “turbo” mode that compresses images, as well as its own ad blocker, a virtual private network and a battery saver feature that minimizes background activity. (Other browsers may have similar add-ons, like Google’s Data Saver extension available in the Chrome Web Store.)

If you’re feeling technically adventurous (or nostalgic), some text-only browsers are around. These include Lynx, which dates back to the early 1990s, and the much newer Browsh.

Browsers that compress data are also available for mobile devices. Dolphin, Opera Mini and the UC Browser are options, as is the Google Chrome app.

Personal Tech invites questions about computer-based technology to [email protected]. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually.

J.D. Biersdorfer has been answering technology questions — in print, on the web, in audio and in video — since 1998. She also writes the Sunday Book Review’s “Applied Reading” column on ebooks and literary apps, among other things. @jdbiersdorfer

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