Green It

W ith the mass-market adoption of networking technology, the Web has often been used as a synonym for the Internet. In recent years, renewed user interest in the Web comes from cloud services such as GoogleDocs, multimediarich portals such as YouTube and Megavideo, and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Although we still refer to this rich set of applications simply as the Web, clearly much has changed in terms of the underlying technology. On the client side, Adobe Flash is one example of this evolution—and perhaps the most important one, given its penetration rate of almost 100 percent in some markets.1 Some have criticized Flash for being CPU hungry, resulting in comparative tests against alternatives such as Silverlight2 and HTML5.3 Here, we focus on Flash because of its popularity, but we can still generalize our conclusions, which are rooted in current Web browsing practices. Other studies have measured the average power consumption of websites (focusing on dynamic content4 or battery lifetime5), thereby providing anecdotal evidence of the existing correlation between CPU load and power usage. Along similar lines, we evaluated the power consumption of the Web from the end-user viewpoint, considering the variability of the websites, browsers, operating system, and hardware equipment.