Fresh Media

If you are browsing the web on a slow dial-up internet connection, there’re a few things you can do to speed up the loading time of web pages. For instance, turn off images, disable the Flash plugin, increase the size of your browser cache, disable stylesheets and JavaScripts, etc.

Now you could either do all this stuff yourself or simply try Finch – it’s a free web service that strips web pages of all extraneous content (CSS, images, Flash, metadata, frames, etc.) so you’ve less data to download on your slow internet connection.

Finch is actually no different from Google Mobile Transcoder except that it formats web pages for reading on desktop browsers while the latter is more suitable for viewing content on the small screen of mobile phones.

Adam Brenecki, the developers of Finch, says that the New York Times homepage is over 110KB, and uses external resources that make it amount to about 1.4MB. Finch trims that down to 84KB, which doesn’t look as pretty, but is 94% less for your computer to download.

You may also find this service useful in situations when you have pay for every kilobyte of data downloaded over the web.