Poorly designed sites can reduce battery life
According to a team at Stanford University, badly coded mobile websites can drain a smartphone’s battery life, more than what is necessary.
The team took a number of leading websites and compared the energy consumption using an Android smartphone. The tests on the mobile websites blamed poor coding choices for unnecessary battery consumption.
The report said,
“Despite the growing popularity of mobile web browsing, the energy consumed by a phone browser while surfing the web is poorly understood. We hope this paper demonstrates the importance of building a mobile site optimised for mobile devices but sites that do not, end up draining the battery of visiting phones. This can potentially reduce traffic to the site.”
In the test Apple.com came out the worst due to the site not having a version optimised for mobile use. On the other hand, Gmail was declared the most efficient site in the tests. The reasons being that it uses HTML functions rather than the power hungry Javascript.
Researchers stated that their experiments suggest that using links instead of Javascript greatly reduced the rendering energy for the page and by designing the mobile site differently to the desktop site, Gmail was able to save energy on the phone.
