Robert Hansen writes on the Internet Security blog an interesting piece about Browser Power Consumption.
While this exercise was not a real scientific study, it provided enough evidence to point to clear areas of power consumption in every day web applications.
He tests IE 7.0 and Firefox 3.0.4 on a Dell laptop.
The Results
> The Results: There were several significant results that were found during the tests. The first was that the most important attribute of a website in terms of power consumption appears to be things like Flash animations and AJAX. These draw a significant amount of power long after the page has completed. During the tests it was found that the amperage tracked almost perfectly with the task manager CPU graph, visually giving clues as to timed events.
Flash is the least “green”
The number one most abusive technology appeared to be Flash banner ads. For the most part they are no different than the rest of the site, except that they continue to rotate. They could have easily been programmed to stop rotating after a few seconds, to return the site to a conservative power usage, but they weren’t. While other technologies can and did cause power spikes, they caused issues far less often than Flash, making it the least “green” technology we came across.
Browser Amperage Watts Average across entire Alexa 100 in Internet Explorer 7.0 0.414 48.852 Average across entire Alexa 100 in Firefox 3.0.4 0.406 47.908 Average for top 10 power abusers in Internet Explorer 7.0 0.474 55.932 Average for top 10 power abusers in Firefox 3.0.4 0.481 56.758 Average for top 10 power abusers in Firefox 3.0.4 with NoScript and Adblock Plus 0.382 45.076
Conclusion
Conclusions: It does appear that it would be possible to surf in a “green” manner. That is, reducing the amount of client side scripting that runs within the browser, returning the browser to a static page while not viewing the page or closing the browser when not in use, and using power save modes built into the operating system. While the differences may appear to be minor in power usage, power consumption does add up over time.
The study is non-scientific, but still quite enlightening. Check it out.