Bandwidth Saver

A Chrome / Firefox extension for monitoring and reducing data usage by compressing and modifying network request headers.

Settings are configured globally and may be optionally toggled per site.¹

Bandwidth Monitoring

Using the non-blocking webRequest, and Performance API, the bandwidth consumed by requested assets can be measured semi-accurately.

Statistics are stored per day for at most 90 days of use, beyond that, older entries get combined into a total sum, to prevent unbounded growth (and especially because data that old won't have much use).

Why use the two of them?

• webRequest doesn't help here if the request is lacking the Content-Length header.
• Performance API has issues with cross-origin resources that don't have the Timing-Allow-Origin header properly set.

Compression

Modes

There are two different modes of compressing assets at the moment; simple redirect, and server-side proxying:

Simple Redirect

The simplest implementation that redirects all relevant requests to a single public compressor endpoint.

Server-side Proxy

Simply redirects all relevant requests to a remote / self-hosted proxy that returns the compressed version.

Two free test proxies that can be used are bandwidth-saver.wuchijss2.workers.dev, and bandwidth-saver.onrender.com². Use either in the popup.

Comparison

S/N	Simple Redirect	Server-side Proxy
MV3 Support	Yes	Yes
No Server Costs	Yes	No (if you exceed free limits)
Fallback(s) on failure	No	Yes
Can use the original url as reference	No	Yes
Intercepts requests	Yes	Yes
Calculates bandwidth saved?	No	Yes

Storage

Settings and statistics are stored locally per browser profile. The former can be manually backed up and restored.

What will not be supported

• Ad or asset blocking.
  • There are better suited extensions for that like Ublock, and it's recommended to have an ad-blocker to get rid of all the trash bogging up websites.

Footnotes

1. Supporting specific settings for each site is too much work in MV3 ↩

2. The worker host is much, MUCH faster than the render alternative, since the latter will sleep after a while of inactivity, however it has a higher chance of failure due to cloudflare's worker free tier execution time limit of 10ms ↩