[yowlingcat]

Are you sure the subject is a complaint and not an exploration? It seemed more to be an exploration of the energetic and computational cost of serving an average Amazon user. I found it fascinating. 30 watts and 88MB to load a page of otherwise static content does seem a little ludicrous, and I've definitely thought the same thing about much of the content I see on the internet that loves loading a bunch of crap that slows my machine down to a halt.

[zarkov99]

Yes, it seems pretty clear that the author feels oppressed by Amazon: "To put it bluntly, the user is not just exploited by means of their free labor, but is also forced to assume the energy costs of such exploitation."

[yowlingcat]

Leaving the author's admittedly sanctimonious tone aside (which I find a little grating), don't you think that the topic of energy costs of these "fat" applications is worthy of exploration?

[zarkov99]

Yes, I think that is interesting, but not enough for me to get over the oppression narrative. Furthermore, I am skeptical that there is anything there at all, I can't image that the energy I waste the few times a week I go to Amazon to be anything but a rounding error on my overall energy expenditure.

[yowlingcat]

I get that, but hear me out. I think what's fascinating is not necessarily the rounding error on your overall energy expenditure, but the likely sheer overall cost of that on the whole. I think similar thoughts about bitcoin mining -- the truth us, if you add up a lot of this computation in aggregate, how much of it is wasteful as a whole to the organization or network paying for it? That number, while maybe not huge enough for many orgs to do anything about it, is still pretty large, and certainly interesting for me to think about.

[zarkov99]

Sure, but that applies to anything, does it not? If one multiplies anything one does by 7 billion there is a good chance a large number will come out. Maybe that is a little interesting at first glance but not in any larger sense.

[TeMPOraL]

The problem of web bloat isn't that you waste a little more electricity on a particular site once a week. It's that all the million users waste all that energy each - which multiplied by millions of users, and by most popular sites being bloated, adds up to possibly relevant amounts of electricity (and carbon emissions).

[blondin]

yep. they made sure to say their browser is firefox. the whole thing would have been a moot point if your browser is draining more energy than the pages you visit...

[jschwartzi]

It explains why their Android app was so incredibly slow and burned through so much battery power.