Google destroys the environment with its new ngram viewer

Google's ngram viewer used to be a very lightweight web site. It required JavaScript, but it was unobtrusive. All of that has changed when a couple days ago Google completely redesigned the application. Now, if left up in the browser, even when its tab is not active, it polls 1 core of the CPU to 38% on average.

I immediately noticed it, thanks to the Linux CPU monitor applet that I always run. The process that pinned the CPU was WebContent associated with firefox-bin. Immediately, I turned off JavaScript in the ngram viewer tab, and the load disappeared.

This is what hundreds of billions of $$ cannot buy you: environmentally-friendly web sites. By polling the CPUs on the millions of machines around the world, Google is wasting megawatts of energy and thousands of dollars that belong to its unsuspecting users.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 04:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 158 words, total size 1 kb.