Daily Delicious – A Black Google Saves Energy » SOME RANDOM DUDE

Daily Delicious – A Black Google Saves Energy » SOME RANDOM DUDE
TreeHugger has an excellent article about how a website’s color scheme can actually impact power usage of its audience. Actually, it makes perfect sense, I just had never really thought about it. If Google switched their background to black, it would have 750 Megawatt-Hours a year. According to the Department of Energy, this would roughly be enough to power the state of Pennsylvania for an average month of consumption.

Piggy-backing on my last post, I read this while I was on my way home, feeling good about using public transportation and remembering to unplug my TV when I left the house. Isn’t it amazing what would happen if Google used a black background? (Although a black background has pretty much been a web-design taboo; maybe we geeks and code-junkies need to re-evlauate our “best practices” to make sure they are green practices?) So much for feeling good- the author points out that red and white are the two most inefficient colors to play across a CRT screen. In case you haven’t noticed, I use a lot of both of those. Darn!

On the positive, there is something we individual earth-friendlies can do if we don’t mind messing with a small amount of code or some browser settings. Most people forget that newer browsers allow you to create custom styles at a user level. What does this mean? For most sites, you can tell your browser to do things like make the font larger or smaller and other things like that. For Firefox users, you can find more info on the Customizing Mozilla page. If you’re a geek and have some time this weekend, play with some custom styles for your browser and share them here or with your friends. Designers, check out EMERGY-C, a low-watt color palette designed by Mark Ontkush.

Oh yeah, make sure you read the article from Treehugger!