Firefox now exposes very detailed energy usage figures for understanding the energy footprint of sites as you browse - do any others?

Hi folks,

One of our neighbours in Berlin, the Green Coding folks, told u about some neat new features in a recent version of Firefox, that I figured might be of interest here:

https://www.green-coding.org/blog/firefox-104-energy-measurements/ <https://www.green-coding.org/blog/firefox-104-energy-measurements/>

We’ve been chatting to them about their AGPL licensed Green Metrics tool that they’ve been working on, as it looks likes one of the nicest open tools for understanding the energy impact of various applications by placing an entire system, end to end under test. If you have heard of GreenFrame, it’s somewhat comparable.

https://github.com/green-coding-berlin/green-metrics-tool <https://github.com/green-coding-berlin/green-metrics-tool>

But back to Firefox and the numbers it exposes - do any other browsers offer this?

I’m particularly interested in the Firefox example, as I didn’t know of any other browser exposing these metrics yet, and it seems rely on some APIs that need to be exposed at the system level.

For, if you have an intel machine with Windows, 11, you can get very detailed figures because windows 11 exposes this, and similarly, Macs running on Apple Silicon also expose these metrics because work has been done to expose them, but easier intel machines don’t have the driver support yet.

I had a recent chat with an engineer there to ask about it, I found out that Firefox on Linux could theoretically also expose these numbers (in fact you have really rich data tracked in the system) but for the most part it’s not implemented yet.

One of the reasons is that there is currently no widely adopted tooling in majority operating systems that exposes enough information to provide energy use for the stats you see in Firefox in a safe fashion.

If you want to run Firefox as root on your linux machine, you probably could access the same info to make the charts you see in the first link I shared possible, but well… you’d be running a web browser as root while you surf the internet, which I think very few people would recommend ever doing.

Still, interesting no?

If you want to explore this in more detail

If you’re free on Sept 23rd from noon CET onwards, there’s hackday on in Berlin specifically for folks interesting the environmental footprint of OSS  - you can attend remotely or in person, and there’s a number of domain experts who will be around to provide help if you’re interested in joining.

I’ll be helping host it along with two other folks, Max Schulze of the SDIA, and Christoph Buchli of Helio Exchange, and I’ll share back anything relevant from the day later if there’s interest. Link below for the event:

https://sdialliance.org/landing/softawere-hackathon/ <https://sdialliance.org/landing/softawere-hackathon/>




Chris Adams

Executive Director

w: thegreenwebfoundation.org
e: chris@thegreenwebfoundation.org
t: @mrchrisadams

German Office
Naunynstrasse 40
10999 Berlin
Germany

See our contact page for more details <https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/contact/>