Hey,

my phone plan (free plan) allows surfing the web for free but with very slow speeds between 32 kbps and 64 kbps. Safari would not load pages and just display website is not reachable due to a timeout. So, I came up with the idea to build a frugal text browser with some nice features that works with my phone plan.

I can disable loading images, media or web fonts. I can set an ad blocking DNS. I can even use LLMs with my slow connection. In settings you can set your own LLM base url and api key. In an emergency situation this is amazing!

I hope other people enjoy it as much as I do. It’s completely free.

The app is called Narrow32, search in App Store :)

Btw: The community guided me to ![email protected]

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
    5·
    26 days ago

    I like seeing these solutions in the modern day. If you’re looking to get even more use out of the limitations of your phone plan, you can take a page from computing history. Back when our mobile internet was 64kps-128kps we had these same challenges. I was doing remote server screen sharing on Windows with 19.2kps with VNC and could still perform important fixes in emergency situations.

    Analogous to your situation though, a very clever approach was to use what was called a “clipping browser” such as Blazer for PalmOS.

    It would work with a server with higher bandwidth to receive your web requests, fetch the contents to the clipping server where it would downscale the graphics and remove rich media elements (videos, animation). The result was a surprisingly fast loading graphical web experience. Keep in mind in those days a 320x240 screen was the limit, so you could downscale graphics quite a bit without losing any quality perceived by the end user.

    You could probably accomplish this same thing with a modern Squid proxy server with a custom configuration.

    • q1p_@lemmy.zipOP
      2·
      25 days ago

      That sounds like a great idea. I’ll consider it in the next few iterations. Maybe, I’ll add it as an optional “self-hosting” feature.

  • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
    4·
    26 days ago

    I hate that the modern Web is almost unusable unless you have strong 4G. We used to be able to load WAP pages in a minute or two. There are so many scenarios today where I have less than ideal connection (inside buildings, in tunnels, in the country side, in long train rides…). This is a great solution for that.