

Bloated website code drains your smartphone's battery - camtarn
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/04/bloated-website-code-drains-yo.html

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jws
TL;DR Something went wrong with this article's numbers and they may have used
a very bad phone for testing. ("iPhone" appears early in the article, but that
isn't the phone tested, it was an unnamed Android phone.)

 _Simply loading the mobile version of Wikipedia over a 3G connection consumed
just over 1 per cent of the phone's battery, while browsing to apple.com,
which does not have a mobile version, used 1.4 per cent._

That says, from a full charge, I can load 100 Wikipedia pages before
exhausting the phone, or about 70 apple.com loads.

In the interest of science I just loaded apple.com 70 times on an iPhone 4 and
the battery indicator is still showing a full battery. The phone is working
hard, I can feel it getting warm under the A4 processor, but I don't expect to
charge today.

The iPhone 4 battery is 1420mAh at 3.7V, we'll call that 18,000 joules.

Later the article says wikipedia took 35 joules, and also that wikipedia takes
15 joules to load.[1] Those would imply 500 and 1200 wikipedia loads per
battery charge. (Assuming their test phone had a similar battery to my phone.)

I recommend ignoring this article until you see one with both consistent
numbers, and a comparison of energy used for rendering and energy used for
screen lighting and idling. Is render energy even relevant in real use? Can't
tell from this.

\---

[1] It is possible this article is the work of an Electric Monk.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> In the interest of science I just loaded apple.com 70 times on an iPhone 4
> and the battery indicator is still showing a full battery.

Did you clear the cache every time? Are you certain it's using the same amount
of bandwidth each time?

------
ams6110
As commenter on the OP points out, this is a very isolated test, doesn't take
into account that the "bloated" CSS and javascript downloads, while possibly
not being used on the first page, are used in other pages on the site, and
that during the overall session on the website, those files will be locally
cached.

Certainly doing what you can to minify downloads makes sense for any site, but
serving up a separate minified CSS and JS for each page would likely perform
worse than serving larger files once at the start of the session and then
relying on the browser's cache.

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chris_wot
I believe there was an app for gtk+ that removed all nonessential parts of the
library when you built custom apps... Maybe something like this is needed
here?

