Large wattage items aren't on for that long in my experience. We could get our electric use right down and probably run it on solar during the summer months, save for the fridge/freezer, fan in the bathroom, the kettle and hair dryer.
Even with our paltry electric use we are still getting high bills (UK)! Expense is the biggest incentive for us to get our electric use down.
If server farms have become a bigger polluter than the aviation industry, I see that as a challenge. Use the hardware as efficiently as possible. Caching layers could hugely reduce CPU use. Perhaps we could measure an app's power consumption aswell as bandwidth use?
Perhaps we should build better software that helps to reduce power in electrical devices?
A decade back I remember every office in a building I worked in (in the UK), leaving their machines on pretty much 24hrs. The building manager suggested the idea of cutting electric between certain hours, and people protested.
Phone chargers, desktops, monitors were all on. Probably for 16 hours of each day when no one was there. Even when people were there the machines were barely busy.
Computers could have been suspended to ram or turned off. I still see this even in offices with modern PCs that can boot quickly and suspsend to ram with ease (used to be touch and go).
Could spare CPU cycles be farmed out?
I'm glad to see better power saving settings in newer CPUS, and operating systems. But this needs to be better. Some mobiles can hold a charge for a week even with voice calls. Other smartphones are getting charged daily, some with negligable use. Charging batteries takes more power than you get back out.
Lots of small energy efficiencies could really help. Stuff like giving screen savers the boot, having sensible power defaults in OSs etc.
Since realised that I've bought both SD and MicroSD cards with and without cases. A MicroSD got bent in the post, bought as new. And a accidentally put my foot on an SD while shuffling cards.
Regarding tracking. We had a hickup at work, with a url that triggered an expensive cronjob. It was being hit mysteriously. It turned out to be the new tab page in Chrome or Firefox (I can't remember which one), which was requesting the url routinely. This basically shows that whenever you open your browser a group of sites get requests, whether you have them open or not. Therefore if you have FriendFace say as a most visited site, they'll get a request from you everytime you sit in front of your machine pretty much.
Not to mention web sites that use a graphical icon in the background instead of a textual one or lack a fallback X on pop up windows. I'm forever groping around trying to shut these overlays in the dark.
There's nothing wrong with optimising for Grandma. The key is to make the most useful features easy to get at, and the more powerful ones discoverable.
The bookmark/history manager could be better. It has no autocomplete/awesomeness in the search. It's actually quite an awkward UI.
It's not keyboard friendly. And their are odd inconsistancies. Should the default behaviour of clicking on a link open it in new tab?
Recent bookmarks and most visited are nice smart bookmark folder, these are useful but hard to reach in that tool. Some bookmark management feels a little like a black box.
At least you can tag bookmarks. Scrolling through a massive list of tags isn't much fun.
Well kind of. I bookmark sites and then bring them back up by focusing on the location bar (CTRL+L), then typing * (to search bookmarks), and typing a few characters to get me to sites that I visit frequently. Which is fine if you use the keyboard and know what you are looking for, and already know that shortcut.
The problem I have with Firefox is that it just doesn't really innovate. We've had some small UI changes. But there's legacy cruft still in there that isn't addressed.
Like the bookmarks and history manager. There isn't anything particularly wrong with these data-table windows, but I don't really enjoy using them either. In some ways I think they should be at the heart of the browser.
I think a lot of people use tabs because bookmark management is so crap.
The only bit I resonated with was the similar sites suggestions. But you'd need a setting to setup suggestion services. There's a privacy concern with that.
Other helper features:
Pagination buttons were built into Opera driven off the rel=prev and rel=next, link elements. Navigation could further be ripped out the page window into a browser control. Searching sites and pages could be friendlier. Better form helpers needed. A good feed reader would be good. Tools to help read web content more simply (readability style) would be nice. Plus I like personalising the look and feel of my web browser ever so slightly, and even Firefox doesn't do that particularly well (it ignores some of my desktop theming).
So I think Firefox should really be thinking how to answer the question: 'How can we make it easier for users to consume web content?'. This has to go beyond the rendering engine. So actually a fatter featureful browser I think would be better - but with some very intuitive and simple controls.
On an Android tablet I have, tab switching under Chrome can be done with a thumb gesture. Tab switching under Opera for me is a fiddle and an annoyance. And that's on a larger device than a phone.
I'd be very happy with all animation/audio being click to play. I'd like to nominate a video player to play videos. Currently I can't play Youtube videos in Firefox, so I have to open Chrome for the task. I'd prefer to just switch to an app that played video, and did that one thing well, with controls that I'm comfortable and familiar with. Rather than a g'zillion bad implementations.
Exactly, this is window managment territory. I think that tabs came about with Opera because they were essentially cheap windows, and as window management has been so dire on most mainstream OSs, tabs were really welcome. But at the end of the day, I think tabs like ephemeral/temporary bookmarks - and it's the bookmark part of the browser that sucks.
You might be able to flip this a little. I can spend lots of time sitting in front of the screen and achieving pretty much nothing. Whereas sometimes a good walk and logical run through of the problem is all that's needed, in fact it's pretty vital for positive head space.
I tried this for a short while until a local cat pissed on my netplug! I actually found it quite hard to get comfortable. That's the biggest barrier to being portable in my eyes.
Even with our paltry electric use we are still getting high bills (UK)! Expense is the biggest incentive for us to get our electric use down.
If server farms have become a bigger polluter than the aviation industry, I see that as a challenge. Use the hardware as efficiently as possible. Caching layers could hugely reduce CPU use. Perhaps we could measure an app's power consumption aswell as bandwidth use?