Tips for off-grid Internet users

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I am quite skilled in the IT sector and wanted to share some advice I had to improve your Internet connections. As we all know the more remote you are the slower your connection becomes but there are tips and tricks that help your pages load faster by reducing the amount of data sent to you when you visit a website.
The easiest way to do this is by cutting out popups, annoying adverts, trackers, caching more data on your pc and saving files for offline viewing later. I will go through all of this in the following section. For myself firefox is my preferred browser as it allows all of the above plugins I am going to discuss. Google Chrome does not allow ad blocking as it blocks their income and Internet Explorer is outdated and sluggish.

1. Visit windows download: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/win32/en-US

Mac Download: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/mac/en-US

Linux: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/linux-i686/en-US/

This gives you the full install file and not a small installer that they downloads the files. This way you always have a backup in case an update breaks anything.

2. Install Mozilla Firefox web browser. Once this is done you may need to restart your machine.

3. Open firefox and you will be presented with a new browser window.

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AdBlock Plus

Our first addon will be AdBlock Plus. This blocks 99% or more of the adverts and popups that eat your bandwidth and annoy you. To configure do the following:

1. With firefox open click tools > addons.

2. Search for AdBlock Plus and click Install on the one with the “Red stop sign with ABP in white letters”

3.Once installed close out of firefox and reopen it. Now on the bottom left you should see the “Red ABP Sign”.  (If not click  view > toolbars > add-on bar).

4. Click the “Red ABP Sign” and click Filter preferences. Now on the top of the new window click the Filter Subscriptions tab. Uncheck “Allow Some non-Intrusive advertising”.

5. Click close and you are all done with this addon. Almost all adverts will disappear on pages you visit and the webpages will load much faster. Lets move onto the next section to make your webpages load even faster that this!

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Disconnect Me

Disconnect me stops trackers like advert trackers, personal information trackers and analytics that all send data to third party companies that analyze this data. For all of us the privacy aspect is very important but also for us with slow connections there is a benefit. With this plugin enabled it loads pages 27% faster and pages use 17% less bandwidth on average. This is a huge boost for those of us on slow connections as every bit of data we download slows our page load times, so removing useless data is a great boost for us.

1. Visit Disconnect.me

2.Click Get Disconnect. (Button on the left as the page loads.

3. A little popup will appear in firefox asking you to “allow” the plugin to install. Click “Allow”

4. A new window will appear. After a few seconds the install button will be available to click. Click “install”

5. After it installs you may need to restart firefox. Go ahead and restart the browser.

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Pocket

Pocket is a plugin that allows you to save a webpage to your computer and view it when you are offline. This is very useful for off-grid people as you may not have the Internet all the time. It saves the page you have opened with a single click and allows you to keep it permanently on your machine.

1. Open firefox

2. Click Tools > addons.

3. Search Pocket

4. Click Install

5. Restart Firefox.

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Spellchecker

This addon is pretty good to ensure your spelling is correct in emails or replies. It adds a little red line under the misspelled word. You can right click and it will give you suggestions on what you possibly meant.

1. Open firefox

2. Go to tools > addons

3. Search spell checker or “US Spell checker” or “UK english dictionary” ect ect to find your language

4. Click install

5. Restart firefox and you are good to go!

 

 

These are some good tips and advice to help you have a faster connection without upgrading your service. Please let me know if any of you tried it out and what the results were. I will answer any questions you may have and will also add to this topic or create more off-grid applicable topics if people find them useful.

If there are any topics you can think of that might be useful to yourself or others please let me know and I will try my best to help.

 

Thanks,

Jay

 

 

[retired profile of WrethaOffGrid]

I already use some of these, the Disconnect.me was a new one for me, I particularly like their search protection… I am having a weird thing happen though, I install the Disconnect Search, it installs OK, then when I reboot FireFox, it’s gone, when I look at my add-ons, it’s still there, but the icon is gone from my toolbar and my search from my search bar reverts back to normal. I have been in contact with their customer service, they were quick to reply, this is the first time they have heard of this. I’ve been trying to determine what might be causing it, for now I’m just reinstalling each time I start FireFox… hopefully I’ll figure out what is causing this and make it stop.

Wretha

[Anonymous]

Hey Wretha,

That is an unusual problem. Let me know what they say.  Do you have the latest firefox installed? Go to help > about firefox. A new window will appear. right under the big letters reading Firefox there is a number. Mine is 26.0 which is the latest version. Give that a try and if it is an old version use  the link above to install the latest firefox.

 

 

[retired profile of WrethaOffGrid]

Jay, I am running the latest version, I have automatic updates, I’m using version 26.0 and it says it’s up to date. The people at Disconnect Search customer help told me they had never encountered this before either and couldn’t give me any help… about the only thing I can do is to do a “restart with no addons installed”, make it permanent, then install that one first, then install my other ones… I’m not ready to do that, I have quite a few addons and they are tweaked to my liking right now, eventually I will do that just not now.

For now, what I do is I have 4 tabs that open when the browser starts, Disconnect Search is one of them, it only takes a few seconds to do another install, and since it doesn’t require a restart, it’s not that big a deal to do it each time I start FF.

[Anonymous]

Change the disconnect.me tab to this:

https://addons.mozilla.org/downloads/latest/disconnect?src=external-home-button

This will popup the install window. All you have to do then is hit install and its done. One less step for you.

[retired profile of WrethaOffGrid]

Thanks Jay, had to change the URL to https://disconnect.me/extensions/search.xpi then it worked just fine :) What a great idea…

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