The ability to turn off animations in browsers

Hello everyone,

I'm new to this list, but not to the web, I've been working with it since 
1999. My concerns about the destruction of our environment (thus the 
extinction of species) and the growing hunger for energy (but the lack of 
cheap renewable energy) have led me to ask developers to reduce the 
energy-consumption of the websites we create. This can be achieved by giving 
the users the ability to turn off animations browserwide to save energy and 
time.

Theory

a, Most of our energy resources pollute or danger the environment:
1, petroleum is still cheap, but it is going to deplete in our future, and 
it's polluting
2, coal is polluting
3, solar energy is expensive
4, nuclear energy is dangerous because no governments can ensure the 
guarding of nuclear waste for 10 000 years (until then they can be used to 
build nuclear weapons for example by terrorists)

b, Even though the number mobile devices is growing, but the technology of 
battery cells is developing much slower, leading to user inconvenience.

c, Website animations come with two problems:
1, they cost energy to render
2, many user interactions can only be started only after an animation has 
already finished, so users' time is wasted
By summarizing these little seconds in global, we are talking about years 
and gigawatts.

Proposal

I propose to make two little additions to the browsers:

1, a global / per site setting to turn off animations
This can be done for example by setting the durations of animations to 0 
second

2, a global variable that can be read to determine of the animation setting
This can be used by libraries like jQery to set their animation durations to 
0
For example it could be read like this:
if (window.animationsTurnedOff) {
  (...)
}

Gábor Hidvégi
Hungary

Received on Friday, 7 June 2013 06:40:37 UTC