Do you know any proxy solution that saves bandwidth like Opera Mini, but for the computer?

The vast majority of websites you visit (including Fluther!) compress their content with gzip. Just use a modern web browser and you’ll be about as optimized as you can get.

The Opera Mini trick works because mobile phone are (relatively) slow and have latency that allows Opera the time to compress everything into a pre-rendered blob. Full computers don’t have this inherent latency and would actually appear slower if you tried the Opera Mini trick since Opera has to grab the content, render and compress it which is an extra unnecessary hop since full computers have the resources to render web pages very quickly.

Thanks @timtrueman but that’s not exactly what I want… let’s focus on the images. I know some ISP’s from another age (read: dial-up 56kbps) at some point implemented a proxy feature with image compression, which was meant to speed up the browsing. In my case it’s not so much about speeding up the browsing (I’m with 3.5G), it’s more with the intention of saving megabytes… just in this session I used about 50 megabytes just browsing (I have nothing updating in the background, if you think of that) and considering the fact that I pay 15 euros for 300 megabytes, if I don’t keep a control my data plan will quickly run out and I’ll start to pay extra. I hope to find something… it makes sense to me that it exists.

@rexpresso Ahh that makes more sense. Most sites already compress their images but the core problem is the content is intended for those with broadband so it’s got images, videos and lots of interactivity. Try using the mobile version of sites by switching your “useragent string” to a mobile browser (there’s plugins/extensions that let you lie about what browser they are, mostly for testing purposes). That would probably save a fair bit of bandwidth. The other thing you could do is use a plugin/extension that puts up a placeholder for images and you have to click to load the actual image.

Indeed so far the only thing coming close to what I want is http://lawand.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/opera-mini-for-windows/ . . .

I seem to be getting closer… seems like Web Accelerator is the name of what I’m looking for.

http://www.google.pt/search?q=commercial+web+accelerator&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:pt-PT:official&client=firefox-a

Opera Turbo. It’s a standard feature on the Opera browser. You can turn it on and off with one click.

@rexpresso +1 for opera turbo. also turn off things like javascript and heck even images if you want.

Fantastic guys, thanks for reminding me of Opera Turbo. I had known about it before, but totally forgot. In any case, I can’t download Opera right now, for the aforementioned reasons, but I will, for future situations.

And I also found http://fastun.com/ which seems to be an interesting web accelerator where you just have to register and then you just edit the browser proxy settings accordingly. I’m setting it up, will report back.