Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a new, open-source computer programming framework that could make the web significantly more energy efficient, allowing people to save more battery power while browsing on mobile devices.
To help mobile device users maximize their limited battery storage, electrical and computer engineering professor Vijay Janapa Reddi and graduate student Yuhao Zhu have developed what they are calling “GreenWeb,” a set of web programming language extensions that enable web developers to have more flexibility and control than ever before over the energy consumption of a website.
The researchers have made the framework available to the public at WattWiseWeb.org. They integrated GreenWeb into Google Chrome and reported energy savings of 30 to 66 percent over Android’s default mode. Mobile device users spend nearly two-thirds of their time browsing the web, so that amount of energy savings could result in a 20 to 40 percent battery life extension.
GreenWeb more efficiently guides the web browser engine to save processor energy without sacrificing user experience. The language extensions, implemented as CSS style rules, allow developers to express hints to the browser, which in turn conserves power when excessive computational horsepower is not necessary.
The researchers also developed AutoGreen, an automatic tool within the GreenWeb framework to assist developers in automatically making webpages energy-friendly.
