How to surf faster when you have a rotten connection? (With uBlock Origin, ScriptSafe, Pi-hole and TripMode)

In France (in big cities anyway), we are used to having a fast connection (long live fiber optics!), unlimited and cheap (thanks Free!).

Travelling all over the world, we realize that it is far from being the same in every country. Even if Wi-Fi has become a convenience, it isn’t always unlimited, it is rarely fast and it can be expensive 🙂

As digital nomads working on the internet, we can work (almost) anywhere in the world but we avoid :

• Countries at war (that’s why Syria isn’t on the program for example).
• Countries where the connection speed is too low (that’s why we removed Laos from our itinerary for example).

In use, it was possible to measure that to work in the right conditions one needed :

• 3Gb of bandwidth per day for two only for work (excluding leisure). We regularly exchange large files and make regular calls via VoIP, it consumes!
• At least a downlink rate of 3 MB / second. The web pages are getting heavier and heavier. Below this speed we have a latency time at each click that becomes painful
• At least anupward flow of 1 Mb / second. Below that, our interlocutors may hear us with a robot voice or jerky when we make calls, not at all ideal.

3 Mb / second going down, 1 Mb / second going up, seen from France it seems ridiculous… But we have to make do with 😀 Between Turkey, Morocco and even right now in Portugal, it’s been 5 months that we have connection speeds that flirt dangerously with these low limits.

And when we spend our days on the Internet and we have experienced the speed of the Parisian optical fiber connection, or more recently the Japanese or Korean connections, it’s relou 😀

Themobile connections are much better and we have gotten used to using them for our calls. On the other hand, our SIM cards are rarely unlimited, so we absolutely have to use Wi-Fi for everything else, otherwise we’ll have to buy a SIM card every other day and make a hole in the budget.

As we have no power to improve the speed of our Wi-Fi, we can play on another variable: the weight of the web pages.

And there I went into Nazi mode, I’m in the extermination business

What you need to know is that the average page weight is constantly increasing. According to some studies, the average page weight was 620 KB in 2010 to 2.48 MB in 2018 ( a 4-fold increase !).

While it may seem quite logical that page weights increase as throughput increases, what is particularly frustrating is that avery significant portion of this overweight is “unnecessary”.

Indeed the majority of this increase is shared between ads, trackers that study your habits, banners asking you to accept cookies, windows to propose you to subscribe to a newsletter, subscription proposals, … it never ends, it forces you to multiply the clicks, and it consumes a lot of bandwidth.

Let’s see how to eradicate all that.

Disabling JavaScript with ScriptSafe

The good news with all the parasites cited just now is that the vast majority use JavaScript technology.

By disabling JavaScript, impossible for them to load, they will become invisible.

This is what the ScriptSafe extension on Google Chrome offers (thanks to Didier and Julien for the discovery).

With ScriptSafe, some sites that use (too much) JavaScript technology will become unusable, it is therefore possible, on a case by case basis, to allow the execution of JavaScript.

There is clearly a long “learning” time, but once this stage is over, it is a pleasure and the gain in loading speed is very significant.

I did a test with the home page of the Le Figaro website.

With ScriptSafe enabled, the page loads in 2.16 seconds after making 63 calls and downloading 173 KB of data.

Without ScriptSafe, the page loads in 21 seconds, after making 389 calls and downloading 1,800 KB of data.

No comment!

Killing ads with uBlock Origin

uBlock Origin is what we call an adblocker, it’s also an extension of your browser that will block all elements that it identifies as ads.

Most ads use JavaScript and will already be killed by ScriptSafe but uBlock Origin will take care of the ones that fall through the cracks.

Why uBlock Origin instead of the more famous Adblock?

On the one hand uBlock Origin is known to have a lower memory consumption than Adblock, your browser will thank you.

On the other hand, Adblock clearly has rogue methods by offering site publishers to pay to disable blocking of their ads. Yes, it sounds like a racket.

Cut ads on cell phones with Pi-hole

With ScriptSafe + uBlock Origin, you are well for your computer surfing. The gain in visual comfort and speed is very appreciable.

However, it isn’t yet possible to add extensions to a mobile or tabletbrowser.

And as you may have already noticed, some mobile sites or applications are real Christmas trees filled with ads.

I recently discovered a solution: Pi-hole (thanks to Loïc for the discovery)

Pi-hole is clearly not an easy solution to set up, it will be reserved for the geekiest among you.

Pi-hole is a DNS server

You all use a DNS server without knowing it. A DNS server is a kind of directory that transforms a domain name (tourdumonde5continents.com for example) into an IP address (109.234.164.63 in our case) which is the identifier of the server on which the content must be retrieved.

To make it more simple, when you type “tourdumonde5continents.com” in your browser, it will ask the DNS server where the site lives to come and get the content to display.

This is where Pi-hole is vicious, when the browser asks him where a domain corresponding to an advertising service lives, he answers that he doesn’t know where he lives. Ahahaha.

Pi-hole must be installed on a server. Many install it on a Raspberry (a tiny computer that costs about thirty euros)

To avoid having to carry around a small box, I installed it on an external server and use it via a VPN. It has a few drawbacks but it allows me to use it from anywhere, it’s great. It’s clearly a geek thing but following this documentation, it’s pretty good.

And it’s devilishly efficient, after a few days of use, I notice that my Pi-Hole blocks more than 20% of the requests, knowing that ScriptSafe and uBlock Origin already block a lot of them upstream.

Alternative to this technical solution: Brave Browser is an excellent browser available for tablet and mobile that natively integrates an ad blocker

Another alternative recently discovered: the Blokada software that acts as a VPN and blocks ads.

Manage the software that are allowed to connect to the internet with TripMode

Between synchronizations (Dropbox, Evernote, Drive, …), system updates and various downloads, your softwares use a lot of internet speed without asking your opinion.

With the TripMode software, you can take back the power over all this, I’ve talked about it in detail here.

Conclusion

Before I had slow connection speeds, I was already using uBlock Origin which is already doing a hell of a job

By adding ScriptSafe, Pi-Hole and TripMode, there is still a big gap to fill that will considerably improve your surfing speed.

From a moral viewpoint, however, it should not be forgotten that by doing so, you are depriving site publishers who live on advertising of their revenues. So don’t hesitate to disable these tools for sites you like and want to support.