You might think that any individual effort to reduce the web’s environmental impact is a drop in the ocean. But as tech workers, we are in a position of relative power compared to other industries. We build products that might be used by thousands, even millions of users. Any improvements we make have the potential for a vast impact when scaled up to that level.
A good overview from Michelle.
Did you hear the one about two Irishmen on a podcast?
I really enjoyed this back-and-forth discussion with Gerry on performance, waste, and more. We agreed on much, but we also clashed sometimes.
The Jevons Paradox in action:
Faster networks should fix our performance problems, but so far, they have had an interesting if unintentional impact on the web. This is because historically, faster network speed has enabled developers to deliver more code to users—in particular, more JavaScript code.
And because it’s JavaScript we’re talking about:
Even if folks are on a new fast network, they’re very likely choking on the code we’re sending, rendering the potential speed improvements of 5G moot.
The longer I spend in this field, the more convinced I am that web performance is not a technical problem; it’s a people problem.
The way you build web pages—using IntersectionObserver, for example—can have a direct effect on the climate emergency.
Webpages can be good citizens of battery life.
It’s important to measure the battery impact in Web Inspector and drive those costs down.
Maybe when I wrote about performative performance? Michelle has a prime example:
The low carbon toggle does absolutely nothing.
In fact, worse than nothing. It doesn’t prevent images being downloaded. It doesn’t switch the site to dark mode, or prevent autoplaying animations (e.g. the hero carousel), or reduce resources transferred in other way. All it does is overlay an extra element with a background gradient on top of the large images on the site to give the appearance that those images being prevented from loading.
But is it always the case that faster websites are greener websites? We reluctantly have to consider another facet: if making a website for a car manufacturer faster leads to an increase in the number of cars sold, can we really say that our website is greener?
This is very timely for me, given that Clearleft is currently engaged on a project that’s making me decidedly queasy for this exact reason—the success metrics of the project would be net negative for the world.
Fear of a third-party planet.
It’s almost as though humans prefer to use post-hoc justifications rather than being rational actors.
Business, sustainability, and inclusivity.