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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that frustrates me about apps/web is that most people have no idea what individual apps/sites are “costing” them. Without additional tools and watching Cellular Data settings like a hawk, stupid things can slurp up your data plan.

Entire books could be sent to people in a sane format but a 3-line web page wrapped in garbage takes dozens of megabytes? An app that does “very little” is consuming 100 MB in no time?

Worse, no one seems to want to “pay” for apps anymore (demanding everything be free) but then they blow $10 on data because their “free” app is routinely shoving unnecessary amounts of data to their device.

We need some hard limits on data; if I give your app 100 K, you shouldn’t be able to use any more. Furthermore, the default data limits should be very low (with big scary dialogs appearing when apps request more) to discourage lazy designs that offload their true costs onto unsuspecting consumers.

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This is why I disable background data for individual apps and keep data saver on whenever possible.

Also, browsing can be something like: - Ad blocking - Javascript disabled by default - remote fonts disabled - media eg images disabled if possible - cookies disabled by default

The first 2 are possible using UBlock Origin + Firefox on Android devices. Ad blocking is a must.

Also, you can use some local VPN app like netguard to restrict app's data usage. I don't remember whether you can specify data usage limits though. But it can prevent entire apps from accessing internet.

Then about web pages. On desktop I routinely use text browsers or simple GUI browsers because they are so fast. Even your regular browser can go a long way with JS disabled by default and ad blocking.

uBO also lets you set the maximum size of media elements so that you can restrict them to say 50KB max. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

Out of the box Android will alert you if an application seems to be using a lot of bandwidth on either the cellular connection or a WiFi link marked as costing money.

[Of course an Android modified by your phone company or product manufacturer may not do this]

There's also an overall summary month-by-month for apps.

Long press the mobile connection, pick App data usage and you get a chart and a list, ordered by amount used and with a warning that your operator might count things differently†

Mine says Pokemon Go uses a lot of bandwidth, which makes sense, also one of the free games I play made some requests while I was away from home and I unblocked it, after that comes Chrome looking at web sites.

†e.g. New Zealand zero rated all their COVID-19 related government services, and as a free bonus they get to find out how much the providers think that's worth and decide if in fact they'd prefer all government services were zero rated forever)

At $35 per gigabyte, visiting a badly written website could cost $0.5 just for opening a home page.

And it's not like people don't have FOSS tools to optimize images, or read for free on how to make browser load smaller or different format (like webp) of images on smaller screen devices.

Often times developers just don't care because it doesn't cost them anything.

So disabling all images in the browser is a must if one doesn't want to pay for grabage stock photos, and experience suffers on all websites as a result. I don't really consider sending all browsing data to Google by using their image optimization proxy as an alternative.

Caring, however, does have a cost. Not every website owner knows how to create lean, efficient websites.

Or you could limit the size of media elements https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

That probably only works if the remote sends the content-length header, right? Or will it also terminate requests that simply keep loading past the 50kiB or whatever mark?

Anyway, looks like a reason to use Firefox on mobile. :)

> That probably only works if the remote sends the content-length header, right?

Correct: "If the media elements do not have Content-Length header present, then this switch will fail to block the said media elements by size."

Source: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

> One of the things that frustrates me about apps/web is that most people have no idea what individual apps/sites are “costing” them

It's not an issue with web apps but issue with outdated bandwith limiting.

I've seen Olympics levels of trying to bend the truth, but pretending that reality is outdated so webdevs can continue pushing dozens of megabytes of JavaScript is a new one.

Wireless frequencies are a limited resources and bandwidth will always be metered, more so if lazy devs ignore efficiency.

That's not true at all, as many people pointed out in this thread there's a lot of bandwidth even with 3g connections however it is being artificially limited as a revenue stream.

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