I was introduced to an excellent paper at the Future Insights Live in Las Vegas this year during a talk I attended and really liked by @glan.
The paper is called “Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption” and was presented at WWW 2012, the Mobile Web Performance Conference, France, in April 2012.
For anybody who is passionate about & interested in mobile performance and wants to know what actually kills the battery life on a mobile device when browsing the web, this is a must-read!
A few take-aways
- Many sites are poorly optimized for energy use and rendering them in the browser takes more power than necessary.
- Rendering images takes a significant fraction of the total rendering energy.
- Some sites like Youtube spend around 1/4 of their rendering energy on images.
- Javascript is one of the most energy consuming components in a web page.
- Using generic Javascript libraries simplifies web development, but increases the energy used by the resulting pages.
- Rendering JPEG images is considerably cheaper than other formats such as GIF and PNG for comparable size images
- …more below in slideshare presentation
If you don’t have time and rather want a summary, you can flip through the slideshare presentation I created for an internal working group meeting at my current company.
[slideshare id=14347830&w=427&h=356&sc=no]
Link to paper: http://www2012.org/proceedings/proceedings/p41.pdf