Quit making battery-draining webpages

[tangor]

Apple WebKit engineers Benjamin Poulain and Simon Fraser have offered advice to web developers about how to design power-efficient web pages, to preserve the life of mobile device batteries and give users move time interacting with web content.

"Web developers rarely think about power usage, but they really should," said Fraser, via Twitter.

[theregister.co.uk...]

Among the generalities presented in this article is reducing the amount of JS and scripting, including ads, etc. Whew! Trim the CSS, optimized images, no autoplay, delayed loading, most of which are pretty standard for those who want the fastest, leanest, most user friendly websites possible.

Mobile devices do burn through power/batteries with "busy" pages, and might be one reason why some users are opting to run script killers and ad blockers ... to preserve their battery life during the day!

[Lexur]

I seriously doubt users can even imagine the correlation between browser processing and energy consumption.

[tangor]

@Lexur ... I suspect you are correct! Most phone users have no clue on how their devices work, but all of them carry a charging cable and are always on the search for an electrical outlet! :)

[graeme_p]

Users do not know or care, so what motive is there for developers to do so?

Putting resources into things like this means fighting management or clients who want shiny stuff every step of the way.

[docluv]

graime_p - I disagree with your statement.

Performance, page speed in this world, should be done by default. You are sort of correct in that developers generally do not care if a page renders fast or not. They tend to focus on what allows them to write the most lines of code, they are code addicts after all (a little inside humor).

tangor - yes these are all best practices for web development in general. But since most developers are not really web developers they are often neglected. What this really means is if you do employee these practices you have a distinct advantage when trying to engage with customers and SEO of course :)
So let them destroy their sites, I will clean up with quality UX :)

[graeme_p]

@docluv, I agree that they should be done by default.

The problem is that even if a developer cares about it, their manager or client may not want them to spend the time doing it. Its even harder to persuade people to get rid of features to make pages load faster: especially scripts that load other content including further scripts.

[coothead]

Small devices manufactures just need to make much larger batteries
that could then be placed in a rucksack, shoulder bag or even a hat
especially designed for the purpose.

The battery could then be connected to a custom made garment that
would relay the power to wrist area of the wearer and then on to the
mobile device.

birdbrain

[tangor]

I suspect the original article referenced in the OP was just a "slow news day" kind of thing.

No serious web designer is going to pay any attention to the energy saving aspect as it does not directly affect them (as energy) and COULD affect them for purpose and presentation.

Or...

Let the other guy pay for it!

:)