The only connection available to me right now is a limited 3g connection, which I try not to squander over huge images/media on the internet. My browser is chromium, on linux, and I tend to use Opera 11 (turbo mode) frequently as well.
Just as an experiment, I disabled images & javascript from my browser a few weeks back. What all have I got?
- Faster pages (I use http://google.com/xhtml occasionally to search)
- Broken websites (http://about.me/n3m0 which don't run on disabling javascript at all)
- Broken navigation (http://parse.com due to images being used as links. And since chrome does not display
<alt>tags properly, it breaks) - Reduced Functionality (Gmail refuses to load chat if images are disabled)
Other than the normal chrome content blocking, I also went ahead and installed ghostery addon. It blocks all advertising, and social media junk (no more sharing). However, it is only useful on the occasional sites I have enabled javascript on.
##Exceptions
I've had to add very few exceptions to blocking, since most of the sites I use work out pretty well. I'd have to applaud github, since their ajax file browser works brilliantly even with js disabled. Their octicons font set works beautifully for navigation with both images and javascript disabled.
###Images
- wolframalpha.com (results are unreadable, pretty bad)
- localhost (testing & development)
###Javascript There are far more sites that rely on javascript being enabled in the browser for their basic functionality (I'm a culprit as well). I try not to add a site as an exception unless it really offers better functionality by doing so.
- GMail - works far better with JS
- AskUbuntu - You can't vote without it. Also mentionable is the fact that the entire stackexchange network uses images as vote buttons, which are invisible if you've disabled images.
- Github - Even though github works brilliantly without JS, its faster with it. The gists site does not function well without javascript, though.
- Google Docs - I still have images disabled, so there are few bugs in the interface
- ifttt - I expected this to work without javascript, but there are lots of troubles with it.
- workflowy - Does not work without Javascript, since its a jquery-ui app
- goo.gl - Yup, you need javascript to shorten a link, now
- Hacker News - You need ajax to vote
- about.me - They have zero fallbacks. I wonder how they work on SEO issues, which must be a prime importance to them
- localhost - Development & Testing
- A few other sites like hashify, ge.tt, jsfiddle and other single page web apps.
Other than this, I use the opt-out plugin from google, and this awesome hosts file to fight ads