The Bandwidth Saver
Modern websites are heavily bloated with massive, high-resolution photographs, animated GIFs, and complex background graphics. If you are traveling and tethered to a heavily restricted cellular hotspot, or if you are using a satellite internet connection where every megabyte costs money, loading these images is a massive waste of bandwidth. Furthermore, loading hundreds of images on complex news sites drastically slows down page rendering times. To achieve the absolute fastest, most bandwidth-efficient browsing experience possible, you must force Google Chrome into a strict text-only mode.
How to Block Images Globally
You can permanently strip the browser’s ability to download and render picture files via the Site Settings.
- Open the Google Chrome desktop browser.
- Click the three vertical dots (⋮) in the top right corner and select Settings.
- In the left-hand sidebar, click on Privacy and security.
- In the main window, click on Site settings.
- Scroll down to the “Content” section and click on Images.
- Under the “Default behavior” heading, click the radio button next to “Don’t allow sites to show images.”
A Text-Only Internet
The change is instantaneous. Google Chrome will completely sever its internal image rendering pipeline. When you navigate to a new website, the browser will instantly download the raw HTML text and completely ignore every single <img> tag on the page. The websites will load in a fraction of a second, displaying only text and empty placeholder boxes where the photos used to be. This guarantees absolute minimum data usage while allowing you to read the core content of the internet unimpeded.