I don’t know what it is, but it’s my enemy just the same.
For weeks now, Wildblue has decided that dialup speed is good enough for the likes of me. No, there’s nothing wrong with the modem or the satellite dish, they work just fine. But pages load with the blinding speed of an advancing glacier, and of course the busier the page the slower the load. For all practical purposes some don’t load at all.
And so I spend a lot of time looking at this…
…at the bottom left corner of which is this cheery message…
Don’t know what it is, but it’s a very common show-stopper. I hate it with all the passion in my heaving breast.
Someday. Someday, possibly even before I die, there will be decent cell coverage in our little gulch. And then I’ll get me one of them newfangled ‘wi-fi hotspots’ you kids are so on about. By then, of course you’ll have moved on to something else, like chips in your head that send data directly to your retinas.
Get off my lawn, dammit, or I shall shake my cane at you a second time.
I do wonder often if there is any particular intelligence behind this whole telecommunication thing. In any case, they don’t seem to really care much about the customers, individual customers anyway.
A construction outfit just tore up and buried a fiber optic cable in the storm drainage ditch along my road. Maybe that’s going to be good? I don’t know, since I’m quite content with the internet service I have now. I’ll bet it will be very expensive, and I don’t suppose we’ll have much choice eventually. Dialup is no longer even an option here. I’ve been waiting for the land line telephone to be abandoned since so many folks now have cell phones.
But it struck me as potentially a bad thing to put a cable in the bottom of a ditch that occasionally sees real flood level water flowing through. They could have put it on the other side of the road, the HIGH side where no water runs… But what do I know? Cable repair job security?
I did a Google search and came across this: http://www.webnots.com/fix-slow-page-loading-waiting-ajax-googleapis-com/
Since you’re using Firefox, install the NoScript extension. Then you can block pretty much *google*.*. That’s what I do, and I haven’t noticed any loss of functionality.
googleapis is for the benefit of the website owner, not the users. Block it.
Good link, jc2k.
I also agree with Bear on NoScript. Only problem with NoScript is that by default it will block a lot of useful features on sites you visit. You constantly have to give permission for this or that, often without having any idea what you’re doing. Still, the permissions are easy and it’s pretty harmless to give and revoke permissions.
Come to think of it, it doesn’t look as if you have AdBlock installed either. That, and NoScript, are darned near essential to protect some of your privacy and bandwidth. You might even want to consider a Flash blocker for the ads that AdBlock misses.
Bear is spot on, Joel. If you will do all that your computer time will be lots more productive.
Firefox with the NoScript and AdBlockPlus addons is essential hygiene on the internet. Speeds things up and lets you know which sites demand you load a bunch of crap before you can view their content.
Claire’s right, it can be annoying when some site demands you grant 50 permissions, or so many that you simply “temporarily allow all this page.” But it is educational too.
Honest sites don’t need input for 40 different servers to show you content. That’s all for their benefit, for tracking and worse. Clickbait sites are the worst, and now I know when I’ve stumbled into one.
There is some education aspect of NoScript that I enjoy. I didn’t know about cdn (content delivery network) or the amazing variety of ad services.
I tell AdBlockPlus to show me ads on sites that I want to support. All others are blocked. Now and then I use a computer without this protection, and I’m astonished at the amount of garbage that I must wade through.
“You constantly have to give permission for this or that, often without having any idea what you’re doing.”
That’s my problem with it. Does anyone know a “noscript for dummies” web page? It’s as annoying to use it as it is to not have it. I just want to cut most of the crap everywhere and still get the useful content, not to vet every dam site I visit. I have almost no idea what scripts are trash and what ones (if any) are useful to the presentation.