The article has a bit greenwashing to it / putting the blame on small developers as opposed to the wastefulness of the bigger players, but what I really see from this is an emphasis on keeping things simple, lightweight & powered by better sources. I could easily see myself using these metrics in the future to push against anything heavier than needed, as well as optimized formats like JPEG XL (shoutout to Safari for supporting, & LibreWolf for taking it out of the nightly-only flag). Dark themes, especially black, are more sustainable too—something that wouldn’t come up in your standard performance metrics.
What I’d push against is the possibly the level of bundle-splitting/inlining optimizations from this or a perf test—when the build is complected with all sorts of heuristics, it’s now lots of heavy cycles to try to process & magically create these bundles rather than pereferring the simple because it’s easier to follow & has less post-processing. I never understood the inling of above-the-fold CSS as it’s not a trivial tasks, sends some duplicate data, now involves a nonce for the CSP, & all to save a fraction of a second on the load versus just keep the initial design less complicated.
You can do all sorts of micro-optimizations to your website and color scheme and those energy savings will be wiped out by one second of cryptocurrency mining.
If you have a big enough site, it could matter, but also it’s still a good practice to keep things efficient & having a measuring stick to push back against adding something that isn’t needed is useful.
Optimizing our sites can reduce the amount of data stored and transferred, and the amount of power consumed by the user’s device.
Yes, but how much? Ugh. I’m not sure the answer to that question is even relevant. All this individual responsibility stuff is just sending a handful of well meaning people into analysis paralysis while our political and economic policies continue to fail the planet.
At the risk of getting OT, the consensus amongst economists is that we must put a price on carbon emissions. It’s not like a typical developer sets out to build inefficient software. It’s only to the extent that their employers care that they’re allowed to take the time to make it efficient. As a corollary, it was only after the ambulance chasers started suing the dickens out of companies with non-ADA websites that the companies were willing to pay for the time and effort it takes to make websites accessible or even define what accessibility means, exactly.
The article has a bit greenwashing to it / putting the blame on small developers as opposed to the wastefulness of the bigger players, but what I really see from this is an emphasis on keeping things simple, lightweight & powered by better sources. I could easily see myself using these metrics in the future to push against anything heavier than needed, as well as optimized formats like JPEG XL (shoutout to Safari for supporting, & LibreWolf for taking it out of the nightly-only flag). Dark themes, especially black, are more sustainable too—something that wouldn’t come up in your standard performance metrics.
What I’d push against is the possibly the level of bundle-splitting/inlining optimizations from this or a perf test—when the build is complected with all sorts of heuristics, it’s now lots of heavy cycles to try to process & magically create these bundles rather than pereferring the simple because it’s easier to follow & has less post-processing. I never understood the inling of above-the-fold CSS as it’s not a trivial tasks, sends some duplicate data, now involves a nonce for the CSP, & all to save a fraction of a second on the load versus just keep the initial design less complicated.
You can do all sorts of micro-optimizations to your website and color scheme and those energy savings will be wiped out by one second of cryptocurrency mining.
If you have a big enough site, it could matter, but also it’s still a good practice to keep things efficient & having a measuring stick to push back against adding something that isn’t needed is useful.
Yes, but how much? Ugh. I’m not sure the answer to that question is even relevant. All this individual responsibility stuff is just sending a handful of well meaning people into analysis paralysis while our political and economic policies continue to fail the planet.
At the risk of getting OT, the consensus amongst economists is that we must put a price on carbon emissions. It’s not like a typical developer sets out to build inefficient software. It’s only to the extent that their employers care that they’re allowed to take the time to make it efficient. As a corollary, it was only after the ambulance chasers started suing the dickens out of companies with non-ADA websites that the companies were willing to pay for the time and effort it takes to make websites accessible or even define what accessibility means, exactly.
makes me wonder which datacenter is greener at my provider :)