Welcome to South Africa, where we are currently behind just about every other nation on the planet when it comes to affordable internet access - we were even said at one point to behind Ghana. You probably thought that was a disease of some sort up until now. But some of you might know of the place due to that lame joke that spread around during the 2010 FIFA World Cup after the country's team was out of the running: “They’ve Ghana way! Yes, there are plans for expansion so more people can get online.
Along with the undersea fibre optic cables, there were promises that prices of data would probably drop, but they haven’t so far. They’ve just gone up, and gone up again, in fact. Telkom is raising the prices of ADSL, but subscribers are getting a bit of a line upgrade on the plus side.
Some say that by 2030 all of us in South Africa - still alive, if we haven’t all been mugged or murdered by that time - will have internet access. So you want to watch your data consumption. You can’t go random surfing all the time, every day. You’ll have to save that sort of thing for once a week or the end of the month. Enough with the questions! Some websites are built with a lot of images and ads, too. This causes the page to take longer to load, and will eat up data quickly.
YouTube is a prime example of such a website. You can literally go through gigabytes of data in a short amount of time. Ads are annoying, but a necessary form of monetization for websites that provide their services for free. But there’s nothing wrong with blocking ads if they’re particularly annoying and make pages take ages to load.
Ads are the chief cause of lag when it comes to page loading, and not to mention they can potentially be injected with malicious code. A well known ad blocker is Adblock Plus which is an addon for Firefox. Some websites like Tumblr can eat up data if you don’t actually physically click on the stop loading icon, which is usually somewhere at the top, over to the right, next to the URL bar.
As long as you have links that will lead you to the resources on the site that you need, you can just follow those. If the buttons you need to press rely on scripts to load or to be enabled (a pain if you have NoScript running), then you’ll have to load the page again anyway. Instead of going through pages and pages; if you don’t find what you want, then just do another search with different terms that will hopefully bring up what you’re looking for.
In Google search and other search engines, you can specify how many items should be shown in search. This is particularly useful if you don't want hundreds of thumbnails of photos or pictures being loaded and eating up data. You’ll waste a lot of time and data loading pages from bookmarks if they don’t lead you to the exact page you want. Bookmark the exact pages you’ll want to visit again. So if you want to get to the sign up/login page on a website, then don’t bookmark the home page, for instance.
Also bookmark pages with HTTPS all ready in the URL, instead of having to add it manually every time. Or alternatively, use a browser add-on like HTTPS Everywhere which will force HTTPS if a website actually uses it. Instead of visiting a website continually to check for updates, rather subscribe to their RSS feed if available.
It does take up data, but less than going to the actual website, and they tend to update automatically unless you specifically set it not to. Then you can scan through the news items that interest you and you're done. A lot of websites either choose - or because they haven't bothered to change it - full syndication rather than the short version, so their articles will appear almost in their entirety depending on the service you use to subscribe. Others might give you a short introduction before asking you to visit the website for more information.
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