毫无疑问，如今的网页内容丰富，需要更多的带宽才能完全加载，但使用基于文本的浏览器而不是基于GUI的浏览器是否会对减少网络流量产生显著影响？今天的超级用户问答帖子回答了一位好奇的读者的问题。

今天的问答环节是由SuperUser提供的，SuperUser是Stack Exchange的一个分支，是一个由社区驱动的问答网站分组。

Lynx浏览器截图由维基百科提供。

问题

超级用户读者Paulb想知道基于文本的浏览器是否真的能减少网络流量：

Do text-based browsers such as Lynx, Links, and ELinks c***ume less bandwidth than GUI-based browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer?

I am guessing that there is no reduction in traffic. My rationale for this is that I think a text-based browser downloads the entire page as it is offered by the server. Any streamlining or reduction of page widgetry is done locally.

Maybe there is some reduction in traffic as most text-based browsers will not execute page scripts or flash files, which might cause more traffic.

基于文本的浏览器能否在减少网络流量方面起到显著的作用？

答案

超级用户贡献者gronostaj为我们提供了答案：

The web server does not send the entire website, but documents that browsers request. For example, when you access google.com, the browser queries the web server for the document google.com. The web server processes the request and sends back some HTML code.

Then the browser checks what the web server has sent. In this case, it is an HTML webpage, so it parses the document and looks for referenced scripts, style sheets, images, fonts, etc.

At this stage, the browser has finished downloading the original document, but has still not downloaded the referenced documents. It can choose to do so or skip downloading them. Regular browsers will try to download all referenced documents for the best viewing experience. If you have an ad blocker (like Adblock Plus) or a privacy plugin (like Ghostery or NoScript), then it may block some resources too.

Then the browser downloads the referenced documents one by one, each time asking the web server explicitly for a single resource. In our Google example, the browser will find the following references (just to name a few of them):

• https://www.google.com/images/srpr/logo11w.png (Google Logo)
• https://www.google.com/textinputassistant/tia.png (Keyboard Icon)
• https://ssl.gstatic.com/gb/images/i1_3d265689.png (Some combined images, a trick used to reduce the number of browser requests.)

The actual files may be different for different users since browsers and sessi*** may change over time. Text-based browsers do not download images, Flash files, HTML5 video, etc., so they download less data.

@NathanO**an makes a good point in the comments. Sometimes **all images are embedded directly in HTML documents and in those cases, downloading them cannot be avoided. This is another trick used to reduce the number of requests. They are very **all though, otherwise the overhead of encoding a binary file in base64 is too big. There are few such images on google.com (base64 encoded size/decoded size):

• 19×11 pixel Keyboard Icon (106 Bytes/76 Bytes)
• 28×38 pixel Microphone Icon (334 Bytes/248 Bytes)
• 1×1 pixel Transparent GIF (62 Bytes/43 Bytes) It shows up in Google Chrome’s Dev Tools Resources tab, but I could not find it in the source code (probably added later with JavaScript).
• 1×1 pixel Corrupted GIF file that appears twice. (34 Bytes/23 Bytes) Its purpose is a mystery to me.

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