The Network tab in Chrome DevTools has an option to faux throttle your network, so you can experience what your users might experience visiting your website on 3G, 2G and GPRS connections. Besides the obvious, it’s also useful for visualising how fonts load.
Here’s how to do it in Chrome v.46:

- Open DevTools (cmd + alt + i)
- Click the ‘Network’ tab
- Select which type of connection you want to imitate
- Reload the page to see assets downloading at that connection speed
If the standard options aren’t to your liking, you can even make a custom Network Throttling Profile by clicking the option at the very top of the dropdown menu.
Thanks for sharing this Chris. I will definitely be trying this out. I am adding it under my testing check list.
Wow, didn’t know it existed in DevTools,
Thanks for sharing Chris
As just an FYI, note that if you select the Offline option, it “works” but doesn’t really emulate offline mode in that you can’t listen for the offline/online events. I filed a bug for that some time ago and hopefully it gets fixed.
Thanks for filing this bug. That’d be helpful to be able to emulate those events easily. Looking forward to it.
Cheers,
Matthew