Research on the battery-crippling effect of free apps, watching video or playing games on a smartphone is well known and highly publicized but, according to researchers at Stanford and Deutsche Telekom, even browsing popular websites can cause rapid battery drainage.

 

Researchers suggest that the inefficiency — caused by bloated and redundant code — can be reduced by almost 30 percent without inducing a diminished user experience, and noted that increased website energy efficiency will become increasingly important as smartphone usage continues to increase.

 

Stanford computer scientist Narendran Thiagarajan and her research team measured the energy usage of an Android phone when downloading and rendering 25 popular websites over a 3G connection. The team discovered that loading the mobile version of Wikipedia consumed over 1 percent of the phone’s battery, as did the Apple homepage, which offers no mobile version for smartphone users.

 

The team repeated the measurements with locally saved versions of tested websites — removing the energy requirement posed by downloading the page — and rewrote the website coding to reduce energy usage by nearly a third.

— Marshall Watkins