On my recent trip to CTIA 2011, I carried along the Cr-48 netbook from Google. On my way there I had to use the Verizon Wireless 3G service to read up news and other content.

Now a 3G connection is not cheap, so I resorted to using mobile mode on most websites. This meant that I used as little bandwidth as I could. Now, there will be several other cases where you need to consume less bandwidth, and not all websites have an mobile interface so what do you do then?

If you use Google Chrome, there is an handy extension called Open links in text only mode created by Shankar Ganesh which will allow you to open webpages without any flash videos or ads.

The extension makes use of the site ViewText.org to strip down non-textual content from webpages and displays a clean version of it. It works on any link on a webpage through a right click menu option.

So if you have been wanting something to view webpages in plain text, head over to install the Open links in text only mode extension.