Tag Archive for Mobile

Building and designing energy-efficient mobile websites

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