This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
Honestly, I don't think that browsers themselves make a real impact on the environment.
But if you want to reduce the impact of your browsing:
I don't think...
The resources usage?
Yeah, but the battery usage due to the browser causes negligible pollution compared to the construction of the device and the operation of servers.
But I don't include only electricity and battery pollution.
It is like say that a video game only have impact in that.
A web browser can put a computer into a stress to make you buy new RAM modules (to increase it) or dedicated graphics card in some case.
Sometimes, even change your current hard drive with a SSD.
This can be showed in offices easily where no so much resources are needed at all.
The website you visit have bigger impact than the browser itself.
Website like Facebook use crazy amount of ressources. It use almost a whole thread on my i5-2430M.
A static page will have almost zero impact.
Other have recommended an adblocker I would also disable JavaScript.
To this end, installing tracker and script blockers will significantly reduce your browsing energy consumption. Even better if you outright disable JavaScript for any site that doesn't need it.
Firefox. You can disable most of its features which connect to something, it's lightweight, truly Open Source and it has many add-ons to make it more accessible for daily browsing.
I honestly don't get why it only has a market share of 8% or so. I guess its marketing is just pretty bad...
If you read about the company then well... Mozilla foundation and their boss are not amazing, and payed up by google so that's not ideal. If your own web browser by default uses search engine that promotes products of competitor, and they waste ton of money of some side gigs like AI which for sure doesn't help. Oh, and also I believe that their ceo, or what is his position called, has one of the highest (or the highest) pay among UK's non-profits, and it is for sure for some reason going opposite way of precent of users if you thrown that on a chart.
For me it was also wierd that Firefox is so nice and yet few people use it. Then I started reading and understood a bit better :p Since that time I'm looking for libre (but not orthodoxic) web browser for my mobile and pc. Sadly nothing did catch my eye for now.
I think Mozilla does more good than harm, especially when comparing them with any of their competitors.
I guess... but oh, they could be so much more.
You could consider making use of RSS feed readers more or basically anything that supports text-only version really
Ptobably stuff like lynx, links, w3m. Linx 2 even has a graphical version xlinks2 but it uses comparable amount of ram to firefox.
I would say also internet explorer and winexplorer fall under this category too.
But they are discontinued by the industry and winexplorer doesn't have all the features IE has.
Inb4 free software gang has a problem with me suggesting IE
Lynx has the best resource usage to usability ratio imo. Turning your computer off will have a way bigger impact though.
