System for Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption

To significantly reduce the energy consumed by mobile web browsers, a system was developed for precise measurement of power consumption by browsers of mobile devices when rendering web pages. The tools are sufficiently precise to measure the energy needed to render individual web elements, such as cascade style sheets (CSS), Javascript, images, and plug-in objects. The invention enables concrete recommendations for web site design to minimize energy requirements for rendering pages. In one example, it was determined that by modifying scripts on a Wikipedia mobile site, the energy needed to download and render Wikipedia pages on mobile devices was reduced by 30% with no change to the user experience.