Several months ago, I read a tip about passing an extra parameter on the url to MSDN documentation to put it into “low bandwidth” mode. I remember doing it at the time, but almost immediately forgot the url switch. That was until last week when I read Eric Nelson’s post on how to do it.
The trick is to put (loband) before the .aspx part of the url. For example, the low bandwidth version of
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object.aspxbecomes
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object(loband).aspxOnce you have accessed it, you can persist it by clicking on the “Persist low bandwidth view” link.
Since Eric wrote his post, it seems that a “Switch on low bandwidth view” link has been added into the normal MSDN pages to enable it to be switched on without hacking around with the url.
Jon Galloway has a post that summarises the benefits of the low bandwidth view. For me, the biggest benefit is the speed of loading, since the page doesn’t run lots of JavaScript to sync the contents tree to the currently displayed article.