Up to 48.9 % less proxy traffic with request rules
Ten real sites through a counting proxy: what bauta's safe, balanced and aggressive presets save, and why challenges still load in full.
Every byte a page fetches through a proxy is a byte you pay for. A persona's requests setting has the browser
block what you do not need, in its own network layer and with its HTTP cache on. We measured the three presets on
ten real sites, each visited by four personas in turn, each persona through a counting proxy of its own, on
October 12, 2026.
Results
| preset | proxy bytes | saved | pages challenged |
|---|---|---|---|
| none | 25.4 MB | — | 2 |
| safe | 18.0 MB | 29.1 % | the same 2 |
| balanced | 13.6 MB | 46.4 % | the same 2 |
| aggressive | 13.0 MB | 48.9 % | the same 2 |
The same 2 pages were challenged under every preset as without one.
What each preset blocks
- safe: audio, video and ad networks' requests.
- balanced: those, and third parties' images and fonts.
- aggressive: those, and every image and font.
Whatever a preset or a rule says, a bot-protection vendor's challenges and CAPTCHAs load in full, as a page must to pass them.
Turn it on
In a persona file:
{ "requests": { "preset": "balanced" } }"rules" adds your own beside a preset, in Chrome's declarativeNetRequest format: block, allow, and
modifyHeaders of request headers. bauta traffic <name> shows what a persona's pages fetched, by kind, what was
blocked and what the cache answered.
Read more
Bandwidth covers the presets and rules, and Proxies how a persona's proxy is set.