The Text-Only Web
Modern webpages are massive, often loading dozens of high-resolution images, tracking pixels, and animated GIFs before you can even begin reading the actual text. If you are on an extremely restrictive, metered cellular connection, attempting to browse the web over a satellite link, or simply want to read news articles without visual distraction, downloading megabytes of graphics is a complete waste of bandwidth. To force the browser into a high-speed, text-only mode, you must completely block its ability to request image files from the internet.
How to Block All Images Globally
You can permanently sever the browser’s image rendering engine 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” heading and click on Images.
- Under the “Default behavior” heading, select the radio button for “Don’t allow sites to show images.”
Maximum Speed Browsing
The change takes effect instantly. Google Chrome will completely sever its internal connection to the image downloading protocol. Every single website you load will now render as pure text on a white background, replacing massive photographs with tiny, broken image icons or alt-text. While this destroys the visual design of most websites, it guarantees that pages load instantly, even on the slowest network connections, completely eliminating bandwidth waste.