Forum Discussion

mcdruid's avatar
mcdruid
New Poster
6 years ago

Data Usage/Ad blocker

Just wanted to share my 2 cents worth on this subject.  Have been with Hughes for 5 years and suffered agonizing usage numbers.  Long story short, finally downloaded free version of Ad blocker( 30 day trial) and saw immediate results.  I actually had data remaining !!!!!!OMG seems all those pesky ads and other unwanted notices were eating up data.   Anyway,  annual subscription under $40 worth the hassel of not running out of data near the end of the billing period.  

Data Management
  • Liz's avatar
    Liz
    Moderator
    6 years ago

    Thanks for sharing mcdruid! Glad that solution is working out for you. I'm going to move this to our 3rd Party Products board.

    • MarkJFine's avatar
      MarkJFine
      Professor
      6 years ago

      If you people only knew how much embedded ad images, css, and javascript there is in a conventional web page you'd faint.

       

      Not only from file size and data usage perspective, a lot of these have to be downloaded from various sites other than the one you're on - making the site much slower to load due to having to resolve each address and any associated latency.

       

      Sites with a lot of images also take a lot of data. The images themselves are usually very resolute and scaled down to size for display. It adds up, so it pays to not automatically display images on social media, etc.

  • gaines_wright's avatar
    gaines_wright
    Tutor
    6 years ago

      There's plenty of free shareware add ons out there, I'm running AdGuard and NoScript.  I recently had a spike in my data usage that I traced to a Firefox upgrade disabling NoScript.  I removed NoScript and then reinstalled it, and things went back to normal.  I believe that a Java script blocker like NoScript may actually save more data than an ad blocker.  Kind of a pain to deal with though, since a lot of sites won't work properly without Java Script.  Some will warn you that they need Java Script some not.

    • GabeU's avatar
      GabeU
      Distinguished Professor IV
      6 years ago
      maratsade wrote:

      Free ad blockers work just as well

      AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin, to name a couple.  Both very popular and work well.  Gotta make sure to uncheck "Acceptable Ads" in the options of the former.