Re: The ability to turn off animations in browsers

Hey, I have just found a pdf about advertisements energy consumption - made 
by a dutch university -, which is not 100% relevant, but you can get the 
picture:
http://eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl/18066/01/Hidden-Energy-Costs.pdf

Personally I haven't made any measurements yet, but for me it's quite 
obvious that displaying content with no animations costs less energy than 
the same with animations turned on. I'm planning though to create test cases 
and measure how animations affect battery drains on mobile devices.

Don't forget that we are talking about huge numbers. Hundreds of millions of 
people use the internet day by day, if only 10 percent of them would turn 
off animations to save energy, that could save the output of hundreds of 
wind turbines for example - worldwide.

Gábor Hidvégi


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tim Leverett" <zzzzbov@gmail.com>
To: "Hidvégi Gábor" <gabor@hidvegi.net>
Cc: <www-html@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, June 10, 2013 6:04 PM
Subject: Re: The ability to turn off animations in browsers


I'm intrigued by this request. Would you mind sharing your data that shows
how animations specifically produce a significant difference in power
consumption across devices?

☺


On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 6:57 AM, Hidvégi Gábor <gabor@hidvegi.net> wrote:

> 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 Tuesday, 11 June 2013 05:47:58 UTC