毫無疑問，如今的網頁內容豐富，需要更多的頻寬才能完全載入，但使用基於文字的瀏覽器而不是基於GUI的瀏覽器是否會對減少網路流量產生顯著影響？今天的超級使用者問答帖子回答了一位好奇的讀者的問題。

今天的問答環節是由SuperUser提供的，SuperUser是Stack Exchange的一個分支，是一個由社群驅動的問答網站分組。

Lynx瀏覽器截圖由維基百科提供。

問題

超級使用者讀者Paulb想知道基於文字的瀏覽器是否真的能減少網路流量：

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.

基於文字的瀏覽器能否在減少網路流量方面起到顯著的作用？

答案

超級使用者貢獻者gronostaj為我們提供了答案：

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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