Any Mac browsers offer the option to surf "image-optional"?

Factual Questions
1

Back in the early days when broadband was just a dream, a webpage stuffed with images or stupid MIDI sounds or animated GIFs or, most commonly :eek:, All Of the Above, could bring everything to a grinding halt. So there were options for surfing without loading the images and other crap. But you could just click on the ALT tag for the image (which would be visible on the page, duh) if there was an image you wanted to see. It just allowed you to arrive at a page and decide AFTER you were there and had some idea of what you were getting into whether you want to let the page show you all it had to offer. Meanwhile you were unleashed to jump all over the Internet at hyper speed, or what passed for it then.

Well, I’m so goddamn sick of the page reloads and scripts and videos and dancing bears being thrown at me I could scream. Sometimes I just want information, I have a lot of “places to be” (windows and tabs to open) and I don’t have time or need for the circus. If certain features are circus-dependent, just handle it the way they used to, with text indicating that the thing you need is javascript or flash or video or css or rubypythonphpwhatthefuckever, and on THIS PAGE, you will have to click the little button to let the thing do its thing to get what you want. But overall, you can still zip around in a relatively quiet, texty world.

So… possible?

As i was writing this and thinking about it in more detail, it would be the ideal to break down the circus into all the potential components with a default option for each one:

Jpeg ON
CSS ON
javascript OFF
php OFF
GIF OFF
Flash OFF

and so forth. Web developers would have to think like car manufacturers; we know you want us to take the page fully loaded, but we prefer the stripped model, thanks anyway…
And thinking further, I’m at the title of the thread, which was different when I started (totally unedited OP…) - there must be browsers for the blind that do what I’m talking about. 90% of the circus shit is useless for blind people and if they are just using audio adaptation, they must go mad with all the extraneous bullshit they are forced to listen to.

So can anyone help on this?
HA! Planned to change the title to something involving blind browsers, but failed to in my rush… sheesh

2

Well, Safari withdevelop menu turned on, and the “click to plugin” extension gets you most of the way there.

3

The Firefox/SeaMonkey add-on Prefbar would give you most, if not all, of the stuff you want.

It’s a very shallow bar that runs across the top of the Firefox window and allows you to turn on and off images, animation, JavaScript, Java, Flash (snd kill Flash), colours, fonts (and make them larger and smaller), cookies (and clear cookies), cookie warnings, pipelining, history (and clear history) and a bunch of other controls.

You can add as many or as few as you want.

Prefbar is here and at the official Firefox/SeaMonkey add-ons sites. But apparently the version at the Mozilla site can’t import some of the later-developed buttons and dropdowns, such as cookies from domain, which disallows third-part cookies from tracker farms and elsewhere.

If you decide to give it a whirl but don’t have Firefox, don’t download the browser from anywhere but the Mozilla download site. Other places where it can be had, such as CNET, have loaded it with redirect code and worse.

The U.S. version of Firefox at the Mozilla site is here.

4

It doesn’t meet your ideal case, but all the browsers I use (Safari, Firefox, Chrome, IE) still have an option to turn off images. So the question really isn’t what browser does what you want, but what browser do you want to use?

5

Opera has the option for the PC versions, I would imagine the Mac version is similar. They have made it a bit harder to find in recent versions.