The life of a smartphone battery is often not long enough for all the things we wish to do. Everyone knows that watching videos and running apps uses a lot of power, but now it has come to light that certain websites are adding to the drain due to bloated and unnecessary code. Wikipedia, IMDB, and the Apple homepage are some of the websites that waste your smartphone’s power.
Despite the growing popularity of smartphones, websites are not built with them in mind. As a result, accessing the internet has unexpected side effects like excess battery consumption.
Stamford University ran tests using Android smartphones on loading and rendering 25 webpages, noting the energy consumption each page required. They found that loading Wikipedia’s homepage used 1% of the mobile’s battery life, and loading the Apple homepage used 1.4% (link).
Some of the energy consumption was due to pictures, advertisements, and other large files loading onto the page but not being used. But a large part of it is also due to the inefficient code run by websites.
The university researchers demonstrated that it was possible to cut power consumption by as much as 30% by rewriting the Javascript of Wikipedia, and other websites, to perform just the functions required in opening and collapsing pages without affecting the user-experience.
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