Engineering Commons^™

Energy Conservation With Open Source Ad Blockers, Joshua M. Pearce

Michigan Tech Publications

Internet-related electricity consumption is rising rapidly as global Internet users spend more than 6.5 h per day online. Open source ad blockers have the potential to reduce the time and thus electricity spent using computers by eliminating ads during Internet browsing and video streaming. In this study, three open source ad blockers are tested against a no-ad blocker control. Page load time is recorded for browsing a representative selection of the globally most-accessed websites, and the time spent watching ads on videos is quantified for both trending and non-trending content. The results show that page load time dropped 11% with …