I built a frugal text browser (Narrow32) because I don't want to pay for internet
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Hey,
my phone plan (free plan) allows surfing the web for free but with very slow speeds between 32 kbps and 64 kbps. Safari would not load pages and just display website is not reachable due to a timeout. So, I came up with the idea to build a frugal text browser with some nice features that works with my phone plan.
I can disable loading images, media or web fonts. I can set an ad blocking DNS. I can even use LLMs with my slow connection. In settings you can set your own LLM base url and api key. In an emergency situation this is amazing!
I hope other people enjoy it as much as I do. It's completely free.
The app is called Narrow32, search in App Store
Btw: The community guided me to !imadethis@lemmy.zip
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Hey,
my phone plan (free plan) allows surfing the web for free but with very slow speeds between 32 kbps and 64 kbps. Safari would not load pages and just display website is not reachable due to a timeout. So, I came up with the idea to build a frugal text browser with some nice features that works with my phone plan.
I can disable loading images, media or web fonts. I can set an ad blocking DNS. I can even use LLMs with my slow connection. In settings you can set your own LLM base url and api key. In an emergency situation this is amazing!
I hope other people enjoy it as much as I do. It's completely free.
The app is called Narrow32, search in App Store
Btw: The community guided me to !imadethis@lemmy.zip
I like seeing these solutions in the modern day. If you're looking to get even more use out of the limitations of your phone plan, you can take a page from computing history. Back when our mobile internet was 64kps-128kps we had these same challenges. A very clever approach was to use what was called a "clipping browser" such as Blazer for PalmOS.
It would work with a server with higher bandwidth to receive your web requests, fetch the contents to the clipping server where it would downscale the graphics and remove rich media elements (videos, animation). The result was a surprisingly fast loading graphical web experience. Keep in mind in those days a 320x240 screen was the limit, so you could downscale graphics quite a bit without losing any quality perceived by the end user.
You could probably accomplish this same thing with a modern Squid proxy server with a custom configuration.