Comments on: Flash Websites Use More Electricity Than Non-Flash Sites?

By: Matthew Garrett

Matthew Garrett — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:15:02 +0000

Right – the intention wasn’t to bash Flash, it was to work out what the extra cost of letting people embed whatever they want in websites. It turns out that it’s noticable but not huge. If people actually want to save the world then there are massively more significant things they could do, but I think it’s interesting that personal website design has an effect on other people’s electricity bills.

By: John Dowdell

John Dowdell — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:09:37 +0000

Your points on methodology are well-founded, at least to support the headline made at O’Reilly.

But I found the original PDF amusing… academic tone, background digressions up top, you have to analyze the piece hard to see what the author is trying to say and what leads them to say it, and whether it’s believable. (Thanks for itemizing the missing requirements, Chad! Seems like the original question was more “What’s the environmental impact of all these heavy amateur sites?” than what the subsequent attack portrayed.

It would be a good topic to pursue — with the world embracing web video, and the move from telephony to internet telephony, then what marginal costs are we accruing? How do they correspond to, say, escalators or overheated buses? It’s a valid question to ask.

jd/adobe

By: Arnaud

Arnaud — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:31:10 +0000

On the other hand, client technologies like Flash can reduce the bandwith compared to a traditional HTML site because we don’t have to refresh all the page, so all depends on the type of application we compare…