GreenWeb Framework Aimed at Creating Energy-Efficient Web: Study

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, have developed a new, open-source computer programming framework "GreenWeb" that allows people to save more battery power while browsing on mobile devices.

Developed by electrical and computer engineering professor Vijay Janapa Reddi and graduate student Yuhao Zhu, GreenWeb is a set of Web programming language extensions that enable Web developers to have more flexibility and control than ever before over the energy consumption of a website.

"Because user awareness is constantly increasing, Web developers today must be conscious of energy efficiency. However, current web language standards provide developers little to no control over device energy use. We've taken an important step toward language-level research to enable energy-efficient mobile web computing," said Reddi.

The researchers integrated GreenWeb into Google Chrome and reported energy savings of 30 to 66 percent over Android's default mode.

Mobile device users spend nearly two-thirds of their time browsing the Web, so that amount of energy savings could result in a 20 to 40 percent battery life extension.

GreenWeb more efficiently guides the Web browser engine to save processor energy without sacrificing user experience.

The language extensions, implemented as CSS style rules, allow developers to express hints to the browser, which in turn conserves power when excessive computational horsepower is not necessary.

The researchers also developed AutoGreen, an automatic tool within the GreenWeb framework to assist developers in automatically making webpages energy-friendly.

The researchers have made the framework available to the public at WattWiseWeb.org and recently presented it at the "ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI)" in Santa Barbara, California.