Orkut homepage - Upcoming birthday section without images

Orkut silently launched a low-bandwidth version. Many forum sites have a lo-fi version for dial-up users. But orkut took different path and rather than giving a separate subdomain with complete redesign, a small setting is added to General Settings.

To enable “low bandwidth” version…

  • Go to General Settings
  • Find low bandwidth setting
  • Click on show the low bandwidth version of orkut option.
  • Hit save changes button at the bottom. (not shown in screenshot)

Orkut low bandwidth setting

Orkut scrapbook without imagesSelecting show the low bandwidth version of orkut option switches your account to low bandwidth version where images in scrapbook, profile pages and users orkut homepage are disabled. Considering users spend more time on these pages this is good.

Still if you like to see communities, friendlist and other areas of orkut or any site without images, you can use imgLikeOpera, a firefox plugin, which turn on/off image loading just by clicking on a small icon in browsers status-bar. (Read more…)

Orkut could have done this better by creating a dedicated mobile version like m.orkut.com or wap.mobile.com. Although you can use Orkut from mobile, official support is always a delight. Moreover being light weight, it could have been used as a low bandwidth version itself!

Update: Orkut have a mobile version now. Thanks Darnell.

Credits: Orkutplus