I have moved to an area where the best/fastest ISP I can get is satellite based. There is a 60 GB data cap that I am constantly surpassing despite restricting most of what we do to Apple Mail and Safari. So my question is this: Will setting Safari to use Reader save any bandwidth such that I may stay under my data cap? Any other suggerstiosn on how to achieve this are most welcome.
I would doubt it. Switching back and forth shows either page instantly. It is downloading the main page, then displaying the "reader view" of the page.
I don't know how to limit that usage. Maybe if you could find a text-only browser that didn't download the images, it might save some, but I don't know if that exists. Even then, mostly the images are small thumbnails, not the full size image.
Watching carefully, that is what seems to be happening. Everything is downloaded and then Reader strips the page down so no savings there. The satellite provider (ViaSat) offers a web browser based on Chrome that it claims to be faster and more secure but does not claim to save on bandwidth. hhttps://browser.viasat.com/faq
I can remember using a text based browser called Lynx back in the early days when the best I could do was use a 300 baud modem so perhaps I should take a look at text based web browsers. Yes, eschewing images would yield a great savings but the vast amounts of Javascript in today's web sites is a more difficult problem. Without all that code, some pages will be dysfunctional.
Next, I need to learn how to remove Outlook protection that checks web links before loading them despite the fact that I no longer have Outlook installed nor any other Microsoft Office apps. It is a vestigial tail that I would like to get rid of in the name of bandwidth conservation.
Look in /Library/LaunchDaemins, /Library/LaunchAgents, and ~/Library/LaunchAgents for something Microsoft. That is the normal place where something like that would run from.
Nothing Microsoft in any of those three locations. I then did a search for "Microsoft" in both /Library and ~Library deleting a good number of files. However, there are still a bunch left than cannot be put into the Trash with Finder. I suppose I'll need to go after those with Terminal.
Conserving Bandwidth Using Safari Reader
