If you don't have a web site designed for mobile phones, you don't just risk frustrating your customers when they visit you online. You're also likely to drain their smartphone batteries. That's the message from a research team based at California's Stanford University.
The researchers published a paper entitled “Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption” at the World Wide Web 2012 conference last week. They used an Android handset to browse a variety of popular web sites, measuring the phone's energy consumption as it loaded and rendered web pages. As well as analysing each page, the team also measured the energy needed to render individual web elements such as images, JavaScript, and CSS.
Although simpler text-based pages with very little JavaScript and no large images were generally more energy-efficient, different ways of coding a page could make a dramatic difference - even though the page seen by the customer would appear identical.
A set of guidelines for building ‘energy efficient' web pages has now been produced as part of the team's findings.