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As many people I guess, I sometimes have to browse the web on a slow computer (in my case, a little netbook) and find it really slow. On the other hand, people can browse the web quite fluently with their smartphones, which, although technically wonderful, can't all equal my computer in terms of hardware.
The thing is that the mobile version of websites, when they exist, are sized for use with a mobile and low band-width, so there are less images, less parasite frames...
So I've been looking for a good mobile browser that would work on my computer. Basically, the only tip I could find was to use extensions to switch the useragent in firefox or chrome, and it was indeed wonderful, fast, smooth and all... Until I tried to watch a youtube video,. Then the browser noticed it didn't have flash, and tried to redirect me to the android webstore, whose protocol my computer couldn't recognize.
Is there any workaround to this kind of problems, or, maybe even better, any ready-to-use mobile browser emulator I could use?
T. Verron
Posted 2012-02-19T22:00:06.380
Reputation: 147
Well, for your YouTube problem don't use an Android user agent. For example, on Symbian^3 phones, YouTube offers both a streaming mobile-quality video and a flash based player designed for mobile phones. – Bob – 2012-02-19T22:11:57.953
1What about Opera? They have so called "Turbo" which should be good for such purposes. As I know i was also possible to somehow set the browser to not to load certain components of webpages. But I am not familiar with Opera so cannot provide more detailed advice, :-) – Juhele – 2012-02-19T22:27:29.033
@Bob : it seems that youtube added chenged its mobile page to get rid of flash since last time I tried, but also that this new page can't be properly processed by a regular browser. – T. Verron – 2012-02-19T22:39:40.450
@Juhele : I've seen about the turbo feature somewhere else, I'll give it a try, but I think there are many non-important stuff that get loaded when I browse the web and could be cut down, before starting to suppress or compress important stuff. – T. Verron – 2012-02-19T22:41:17.953
@T. Verron: Ok, then try Privoxy: http://www.privoxy.org/ - it should be what you need - I saw many recommendation around the internet when talking about how to prevent loading unneeded stuff.
– Juhele – 2012-02-19T22:49:22.020@Juhele : aout Turbo, if I understand correctly, it compresses some of the datawe have to load, but then some decompression has to be done on my computer's side? If it is so, it won't really help me, because the bottleneck is definitely not my connexion, but rather my CPU / Ram.
I have the same question about privoxy... How can I be sure that filtering all this is easier for my computer than displaying it? – T. Verron – 2012-02-20T12:11:00.303