New tab vs backbutton

  I almost always use multiple tabs when browsing, that way I can continue looking at a site while waiting for the links I've chosen to load in their own tabs. As opposed to opening the new link in the same tab, and then hitting the back button to return to the original site.

  This seems to be a more efficient way to do things to me, but then I thought, how does this effect my data usage?

So I came up with the following test using Linux Mint 18.3, Firefox 61.0.1, and Linux iftop ( A linux utility that keeps a total of the data flowing through an etherenet port ).

  I purposefully picked a site that takes a moderate amount of data ( around 2 meg ) to load its home page, loaded the site, reset iftop, and then opened every link ( 5 total ) in a new tab. Waited for all the tabs to finish loading. and then recorded the total traffic from iftop.

  I then shut down and restarted Firefox to clear any cache data, reloaded the same site, reset iftop, and then used the back button method on the same links.

  The results:

  New tab          9.68 meg

  Back button    27.8 meg

  I alway suspected the new tab method would save data, but was somewhat surprised by the amount of the difference. I thought that most of the original page would have been stored in the cache, and it wouldn't have to reload that much from the internet every time I hit the back button.

  Of course, this is just a single test on a single site, and it may prove exactly nothing, but I think I'll stick to the new tab method.

"An elephant: A mouse built to government specifications."

Lazarus Long