Speed Up your Browsing.

Written by Ben Friedman, August 3rd, 2016

The internet is a fantastic thing. Never in the history of human kind have we had something so powerful in the homes of so many. The world's knowledge is quite literally a click away. All this, and yet what we hear most often, it's slow! Yes, the world's most comprehensive network of cat pictures, tweets, videos and papers is not always the fastest place to be. Still you can make it fast with a few helpful tips.

Use an adblocker. Advertisements, like anything else, have to be downloaded in order to display. By using an adblocker (which some of you may be doing already) you are reducing the amount of data you need to retrieve. Now you're sparing your bandwidth for that cat picture you've been waiting to see.

Use a script blocker to help further limit JS (Javascript) you would normally be running on a page. For those that aren't familiar with Javascript you can read about it here, but in our case it's a client-side scripting language, allowing developers to enhance their sites with features like smooth scrolling, dynamic effects, validation, etc. So how does a script blocker help besides prevent this code from running? Well, if this script is for Google Analytics you avoid all of the overhead related to google tracking you. In fact, they can't track you at all, it simply doesn't run!

Similarly anything that would dynamically load onto the page after its been loaded (ads, popups, etc.) simply don't happen, and the overhead is never incurred. For some sites this can lighten the amount of work on your own end, giving you a perceivable speed increase, especially when multiple connections are being made simultaneously. Please note some sites require JS for certain functinality, and may not function properly or will ask you to enable Javascript. For issues like this most script blockers, like No Script for Firefox and Script Safe for Chrome will allow you to selectively allow scripts from certain sites, while blocking others, how about that!

Your choice of browser can make a difference. Browsers like Google and Bing provide excellent search quality, however they generally incur overhead in performing multiple background requests just after you've loaded the page (bing more so). Other search engines, like duckduckgo.com don't put such a strain on your bandwidth and can allow you to spend less time loading and more time searching.

Finally some addons, plugins and more that claim to enrich or enhance your web experience can potentially degrade it if your bandwidth is limited. Overall if you find your web experience starting to slow down don't add more, go faster with less. No amount of optimizations or CDNs can substitute for the simple fact that less data takes less time to download. The faster you download a resource the faster you can get on with the next, and the faster you can get on to those cat pictures!

Questions? Corrections? Concerns? Contact us at inquiries@axolsoft.com