I had the exact same problem in China last month, only worse because I was also going through a crowded VPN. The only page I could reliably load before losing

I had the exact same problem in China last month, only worse because I was also going through a crowded VPN. The only page I could reliably load before losing patience was Hacker News. The best workaround I found was to load Opera Mini and crank up the compression proxy. It's annoying though, if Opera Mini can automatically compress the page's imaging and formatting, why can't the web server do the same? We can nag designers/developers all day long about web fonts and whatnot, but at the end of the day, only an automated solution is going to actually get put into regular use.