669 karma · joined November 15, 2018
MightyBytes and WholegrainDigital, seem to be the leaders in this space.
Which is why I'll be sending them a long, annoying list of things I think can be improved.
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the idea of the MozLink thing is that you reduce the number of clicks it takes to find your website — and so reducing the number of requests made to servers.
It's not a very good metric.
This also has the effect of shutting out people with expensive data, or slow networks. Who i'd guess are the same people most effected by the climate crisis.
As for backwards-compatible drop-in upgrades. They do exists, and people do use them. Making them easier would go a long way.
An example would be migrating a wordpress site to be statically generated — there are plugins and services that do that.
The internet is responsible for around 5% of global carbon emissions. It's difficult to measure, and generally not visible to the public.
The solution however is fairly simple — use less data.
Fast, accessible websites usually produce less CO2 and we already know how to do that. Now we just need to get web developers to do it. This will require:
- educating developers and designers - smart defaults for web developers - fostering competition - making the invisible cost of the internet visible
This is a reletively new dicipline — so anything you have to add to the mix will have a large impact.
It's invisible, and difficult to measure, so little gets done about it. But if you're a developer who wants to help. Check out:
https://sustainablewebdesign.org/
Pretty much all the solutions to making a greener web would make the web better in general.
- Send less data (efficient video, images, fonts, etc) - Make fewer requests - Use a CDN (the greenest one you can) - Stop collecting vast amounts of personal data - Better bot blocking - Use PWAs when appropriate
- Change the culture, foster competition for doing the above.
I'm sure there's a thousand more items you could add to the list.
If you want to make a difference, do something local. That's where the biggest shifts are happening — and you're unlikely to encounter any real arguments. People tend to only have those arguments when they have an audience, e.g. Twitter, TV
By all means do those things. But if you want to make a real difference you need to look beyond your own activities.
Change your community, your company, your industry. What can you do that changes the defaults for everyone else? Try and find low-hanging fruit.
Join your local climate activist group e.g. 350.org — they'll be full of people with solutions.
AV1 support would be nice though. Everyone should push for that.
Build your websites with progressive enhancement in mind, and you'll never have a problem with safari again. Safari is great.
It could be by design, by rendering any text in the svg icon google is making a design decision for you. They're choosing a font, or a specific emoji type. Maybe they want to avoid the problems that would ensue.
1. If a favicon is missing or in a format that's not compatible with the browser. The browser will look for a /favicon.ico file at the root of the site. It's worth having that as a backup or you end up with no favicon and 404 errors in the console.
2. Google now shows a favicon in some search results. I'm pretty sure it works fine with SVG. But, if you use an emoji you end up with a missing glyph character as your favicon. it looks bad.
3. If it's inline it won't be cached
I went a bit overboard optimizing the favicon of my site, and found that:
If you design your favicon as colored squares on a 16x16 grid, and save it as a 32x32 .ico file at https://example.com/favicon.ico
You end up with a smaller file size icon, that can be cached, doesn't have any markup on your site, and scales up perfectly on all the icon sizes.
here's an example: https://doodad.dev/favicon.ico
it's just 625 bytes (261 minified)
India has incredibly cheap data. While Mauritania has the most expensive in the world compared with the average income.
Both an indictment of general bloat and Canada data prices.
More interesting is how much it costs for people in poorer countries — Where the absolute value of visiting a site is less, but relative to income is far greater.
Understandably you don't see much about this online — people with expensive data plans don't use it all up complaining about it online.
Depression is used as an example of a disease in the first few paragraphs of the wikipedia entry for disease
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease
Here's the Merriam Webster definition, I think depression fits into it.
Different people have different reactions. This is not medial advice. Consult your physician to see if sertraline is right for you.
Anyway, I eventually took meds, and I have never felt more myself, or the person I want to be. I work, learn, socialize, live in a (relatively) clean apartment, which I leave to go outside.
It took me way too long accept that depression is not all my fault, that it's a disease, and that I needed to see a real doctor.
For those who suffer, or know those who suffer (that's probably everyone) I really recommend this lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc
It's super interesting, it ties all the causes of depression together — childhood trauma, everyday experience, down to the neuron, and chemical reactions. It really helps externalize it.
You can slice it up however you want and you'll always be able to point the finger at some group that's emitting more.
Until China, or the 1%, or the oil industry, or meat-eaters, or drivers (or everybody but myself) stops emitting carbon then what's the point?
The point is, any demands you make of others lack credibility if you've done nothing about it yourself.
> A few thousand were estimated to eventually die from cancer related to the incident.
How many people could conceivably be downwind of a nuclear meltdown? I think it could be much much more than that.
I can't imagine why we would not include the people who eventually die of cancer.
That's just meltdowns. Given that you can also use nuclear material to create weapons, I'd also point you toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples.
The point I was making in my original comment, is that it's only safe when the systems are in place to keep it safe.
Which is not something you can guarantee.
0.04 deaths per TWH of nuclear vs 0.01 deaths per TWH of solar in 2012!
Am I seriously supposed to ignore the fact that nuclear metldowns have the potential to kill millions of people — because they didn't in 2012?
Edit: sorry that sounded mean.
But is it only safe, because lots of time and energy goes into making it safe? If the systems keeping it safe no longer exist — let's say all the security staff are killed by a pandemic, or there's a civil war, or society collapses, is it still safe?
I can put a solar panel on my roof and not have to worry about it destroying my neighbourhood — even in the event of a disaster.
> cheaper
It's well documented now that solar is the cheapest energy source.
That may well be because it's had a lot of investment — maybe if people weren't so afraid of nuclear it would be the cheapest instead — but given that it isn't and we're on the clock...
Using old waste to power nuclear reactors sounds like a good idea — but is it possible in our time frame? If yes, then I'd be on board, but I suspect the answer is that it that it isn't.
If it were, then massive amounts of money and time wouldn't go into trying to make it safe. Nuclear control rooms wouldn't be locked down like Fort Knox. And every major population center would have a nuclear power station nearby.
There's this idea that the only thing stopping nuclear from saving the world is a bunch of hippies perpetuating a myth that it's not safe — like nuclear energy is a genetically modified tomato.
It's not that. It's actually just not safe — or rather, the only way of making it safe is by having round the clock security, big brains monitoring it the whole time, and lots of money.
So, given that climate change will bring with it more pandemics, civil unrest, and natural disasters, is it wise to assume that there will always be people around who know how to look after nuclear power stations? Or people who can stop terrorists who want to make dirty bombs from the waste?
There's a reasonable argument to be made that it's a risk we should take to avoid worse distasters.
But, given that there are cheaper alternatives, that don't take a decade to build, why don't we just not build nuclear?
Let's generate non-controversial power, while massively reducing our usage.
It's understandable that Simple Analytics would use Lighthouse to measure performance and extrapolate from there. I'm not sure how else they could do the test — as presumably they don't have access to Google's data.