Top 5 Effective Ways to Save Internet Usage on Your Computer

Many users in several different countries are actually subscribed to limited internet packages with a certain amount of data, not for mobile phones but for computers, especially because limited packages have higher speeds at a lower price. This has caused many people, including myself, to use these packages. However, you quickly realize that the package has ended before the specified renewal period. This pushes you to do one of two things: either subscribe to a higher speed at a higher cost or find ways to save internet consumption at the same speed you are using. Let me explore the 5 most effective ways based on experience to speed up the internet and save it at the same time.

This article was prepared based on the request of a group of our dear followers in the Inquiry Post on our Facebook page, so this topic is for you.

Since we are talking about tips to reduce data consumption on the computer, there will be similarities between these methods and the tips we have reviewed in the article “How to browse the internet on your mobile while preserving the package,” but there is still a difference. We will provide you with tools for the computer designed to compress and reduce internet usage while browsing websites. However, as with anything in life, there are pros and cons to saving consumption. The advantage is a noticeable acceleration of the internet only during browsing, not downloading. But you will lose the pleasure of browsing websites, and you will understand what I mean when you apply the following methods. Let’s get started..

1- Disable Flash Content .. Disable Image Display

First method: One of the most important steps that contribute to reducing internet consumption while browsing the internet without using any tools is to disable the Flash content that is present on websites, such as moving ads or video clips. This content starts loading during the loading of the web page and consumes data. However, there is a great feature in Google Chrome and Firefox, which is to prevent loading this content unless you agree. When visiting a website containing Flash, it will be displayed as an empty box with a button. Clicking on this button will display the box or the Flash content.

To activate this feature in Google Chrome, go to settings and scroll down then click on Show advanced settings. You will find a button called “Content Settings” after clicking on it, scroll down a bit to find the option “Let me choose when to run plugin content” under the Plugins section and activate it.

For Firefox, after running it, type “about:config” in the address bar and press Enter. In the search field, start typing “plugins.click_to_play” and search for it. You will see the same name as the result. Double-click on it to change the value from Default to true to activate the feature.

Second method: Since images are part of any website visited, they consume a lot of data when loading a site, especially if the site contains many images. Therefore, there is no harm in browsing websites without images to save data. Follow the steps below to prevent Chrome and Firefox from loading images automatically.

In Google Chrome, you need to go to the Settings page and click on the “Show advanced settings” option below, then click on the “Content Settings” button. Start searching for the option “Do not show any images” and activate it. This will prevent the display of images on any website.

As for Firefox, all you have to do is click on the options menu button, then open the Options tab and on the left side, click on the Content section. Look for “Load images automatically” and uncheck this option.

2- Use Opera Turbo feature

The Opera Turbo feature is a feature that is only available in the Opera browser. This feature compresses the images on web pages and hides unnecessary elements from the page, reducing the amount of data used to load websites. It is similar to the Opera Mini application for phones. To activate this feature in the Opera browser, all you have to do is click on the Menu button at the top corner of the browser window. From the menu that appears, enable the Opera Turbo option. When you visit a website from the browser, the page content will be compressed, and you will notice a significant increase in the speed of loading the site.

Let me tell you that you can get a similar feature in Google Chrome by adding Google Data Saver to Chrome for faster browsing and opening blocked sites. It performs the same function of compressing images and saving internet consumption.

3- Use the Mobile Browsing Version

Every website on the internet must have a mobile version that appears on your smartphone screen when you visit the site. For example, the mobile version of a website like “Tech World” takes just a few seconds to load on the phone compared to loading the regular desktop version on the computer. This is because the mobile browsing version does not contain elements that consume large amounts of internet data, such as numerous ads, and the design of the site itself is lighter. Therefore, I recommend trying to use the mobile version on the desktop to save on consumption. Here’s how you can do that.

By using the User-Agent Switcher extension, which supports the three browsers Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, you can browse any website as if you were browsing it from other devices. This means you can browse Facebook from a MacBook or Linux system, or from another browser, including browsing sites from smartphones. After installing the extension on your browser, click on its icon in the address bar, select the type of phone you want, and after selecting it, any site you visit will load the mobile version.

4- Monitor Internet Usage

The tips are not only about browsers and internet browsing, but there are more things that consume internet on your computer. There are programs, applications, and background processes that utilize the internet without the user’s knowledge. Therefore, special programs have been created for the computer to monitor internet usage to know every detail that pulls internet from the device. For example, the amazing program GlassWire allows you to know the programs that consume the most internet and the amount of data consumed from the package. You can also use it to prevent any program from using the internet thanks to the built-in firewall. There are other programs that do the same job that you can check out in the topic “7 Programs to Know and Monitor Internet Usage on Your Device.”

5- Reduce Internet Usage by Updates

This step is specifically for Windows 10 users only. As we know, updates are downloaded and installed automatically on the system by default, and there is no option to disable them as in previous versions. Although we have reviewed a trick to disable and stop these updates completely, I do not recommend doing that because updates are important for improving and fixing system errors. Therefore, we can find a better solution that balances between stopping updates and getting them, which is controlling the speed at which Windows uses the internet to download updates. You can reduce this speed so that it does not significantly affect the internet package.