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Nowadays it appears that many webpages want to use my cpu/harddrive/bandwidth in order to show me their ads/pages/information in beautiful but expensive ways.

Often I like these new pages, but sometimes I'm a curmudgeon and am just annoyed that my fan starts spinning and the EMF loads rise when I open the pages.

Is there a browser/plugin that I can use to throttle, best case, and/or monitor, worst case? I am not very knowledgeable of the Reactive JS, etc techniques, so I am hoping there is an easy solution?

thank you! Anne ps Normally I use Firefox but of course I have Chrome on my machines (win8, win7, mac 10.8) as well.

AnneTheAgile
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2 Answers2

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You need a client side javascript manipulator.. they are known as User Scripts... For firefox, you want something like grease monkey.... its worth a google... This is not the simplest method, but most effective.

Otherwise you will just want a ad-remover addon for firefox.

Example For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom?hl=en

They simply search for common code that are used to display adverts (like adsense) and will remove the code from the webpage anytime you view/load a page.

The GreaseMonkey/UserScripts path would be more if you want to customize how your browser interacts with web sites.. For example, you could say for every image on a webpage to be hidden/removed and so on..

As for monitoring, throttling.. Well, you can monitor.. but to throttle.. well that would require a application/proxy that goes between your browser and net connection.

There was one i used years ago that would allow me to simulate a 56k modem speed while developing web pages.

Monitors: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/collections/smayer97/for-managing-bandwidth-usage/

Throttle/Limiter: http://www.netlimiter.com/

Angry 84
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  • "you can monitor" ; really? How can I do that ? I am not sure which things are causing the big load, but I know for sure they are not primarily advertisements - these are 'normal' web pages, hmm, but maybe you are saying it could be the trackers not the ads? That's the thing, I'd like to know; on page X, it increased my BW/CPU by Y; and within Y, 80% was due to these 2 gifs. – AnneTheAgile Feb 07 '15 at 02:33
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    The simplest way to test this, if you have a suspected webpage causing the issue... Use something like google, Right click on various elements and click "Inspect Element"... wait for the inspector to load, and simple press "Delete" to delete that element from the web page. Chop away at their website and see what makes the change while having your normal OS system performance window open. Monitoring .... is a broad term here, do you want to see your CPU live or the Bandwidth a page is using? Even the "Network" tab in chromes inspector/dev tools is a handy tool – Angry 84 Feb 07 '15 at 02:36
  • You are right 'monitoring' is pretty broad, and I know it can get pretty complex quite easily. I am not sure even what metrics are causing the fan spinning to occur - I presume cpu + bandwidth, but not even sure. It sounds like what I should do is try to pick an egregious page that I'm willing to return to several times and then start analyzing. I think the plugin I'm visualizing has a picture of the page, and for each box, it is colored by how heavy it is. All background items go to the margins... :) I'll try your ideas, ty! – AnneTheAgile Feb 07 '15 at 02:41
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OP, in Firefox 68+ (and probably earlier as long as it's Quantum) you can open Tools, Web Developer, Network, or CTRL-SH-E and see how long each element on a page takes to load. It actually has a lot of info. From there you can tell which ad servers are overloaded and take a while to load. Ad servers often slow down a page load because they are busy, but so do larger animated images shown as ads, or ad videos.

I know this isn't exactly a throttle, but it will help you find out more details of what is going on in a specific web page. FWIW, I simply block all ads on most pages and that helps increase load time and reduce bandwidth usage from Firefox.

Bulrush
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