EcoSurf

Surf sustainable - EcoSurf

We at EcoSurf want to help to raise awareness about your browsing habits and digital footprint on the Internet.

If the Internet would be a country, it would be the 7th largest polluter of countries worldwide and the numbers are rising. Web surfing is contributing actively to the carbon footprint of mankind. That’s where the idea of sustainable surfing behavior and responsible use of data come in. If you take into account all the things that data can tell you about your environment, then using these resources in a way that reduces your carbon footprint is an excellent first step.

We help you to make surfing decisions by rating websites after following criteria:

Page Optimization: The more optimized a websites code is, the more efficiently the website runs and the faster it loads. This not only increases user satisfaction, but also reduces energy consumption, which in turn ends up in a smaller carbon footprint.

Page Size: A bigger page size means more data being send. More data being send means more traffic. More traffic means more energy spent. More energy spent means more carbon emitted. As an example, lowering the page size by one megabyte would save about 0.4g of CO₂ every time a website is clicked.

Green Web Hosting: In order for a data center to be considered “green”, it has to match several criteria. Criteria include, but are not limited to: being powered by renewable energy, offsetting the carbon footprint, use of energy saving appliances, planting plants around premises, and more.

Energy efficiency has become an important part of how internet programmers think about building the web. Data taken out of existing databases is used to produce more efficient structures and ensure a cleaner surfing experience for the user. In order to ensure the energy efficiency of our own extension, we also draw our data from established datasets, instead of wasting additional energy by scraping them again ourselves.

We rely on this datasets:

Dataset A: httparchive.org Dataset B: thegreenwebfoundation.org

Our code is available on GitHub: Extension: https://github.com/chronikum/EcoSurfExtension Server: https://github.com/chronikum/EcoSurfServer

We do not track users or save any data on our servers. Please look into our GitHub code if you want to know more.