Cloud-Supported Certification for Energy-Efficient Web Browsing and Services

Web applications are increasingly pushing more computation to the end user. With the proliferation of the software-as-a-service model, major Cloud providers assume browsers as the user agent to access their solutions, taking advantage of recent and powerful web programming client-side technologies. These technologies enhance and revamp web pages’ aesthetics and interaction mechanics. Unfortunately, they lead to increasing energetic impact, proportional to the rate of appearance of more sophisticated browser mechanisms and web content. This work presents GreenBrowsing, which is composed of (i) A Google Chrome extension that manages browser resource usage and, indirectly, energy impact by employing resource-limiting mechanisms on browser tabs; (ii) A certification subsystem that ranks URL and web domains based on web page-induced energy consumption. We show that GreenBrowsing’s mechanisms can achieve substantial resource reduction, in terms of energy-inducing resource metrics like CPU usage, memory usage and variation, up to 80%, for CPU and memory usage. It is also, indirectly and partially, able to reduce bandwidth usage when employing a specific subset of the mechanisms presented. All this is with limited degradation of user experience when compared to browsing the web without the extension.