eco₂rd

This is eco₂rd, an open-source browser extension that aims to help you measuring and understanding your browser traffic based energy consumption and CO2 emissions.


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Website emissions?
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With every website you open, there is - simply said - data transferred from the hosting provider to your machine. This data transfer comes with the cost of energy usage from different angles: from the data center of the hosting provider, from the network over which this data is transferred
and from your machine as the end consumer.

eco₂rd is measuring this data transfer with the 1 byte model from "The Shift Project" that declares the energy impact of every byte transferred.
Within the extension you have a few options to modify your actual footprint in order to be more accurate.

Via the options you can:
- set the country to measure your footprint with country based grid emission factor
- set, whether you want to take into consideration "complete system boundaries" (this will take a bigger picture into account, e.g. energy needed for manufacturing the servers, constructing the cable and wireless network infrastructure and manufacturing end user devices) or "narrow system boundaries" (if you only want to know the energy required to make data flow through the cable).

Additionally you can
- pause the recording: the recording of your data consumption will pause until you restart it
- delete consumption data: this will delete all of the collected consumption data


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Data Center information
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If you pin eco₂rd to show up next to your address field in your browser, you will notice a color change of the icon from time to time.
The icon indicates whether the website tab you have currently opened is hosted on a data center that is certified by the Green Web Foundation as "green" data center (https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org).

There are 3 different states:
- green: the data center is known as green data center by GWF
- red: the data center is not listed as green data center by GWF
- grey: eco₂rd does not have yet information about the data center.


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Historical data
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eco₂rd currently has 3 different time scopes that you can switch through when analysing your consumption:
Today - it shows the consumption and CO₂eq of today
This month - it shows the consumption and CO₂eq of the current month
Historical - it shows the consumption and CO₂eq that your browsing behaviour caused since the start of the extension over the months and years. This feature got introduced with version 0.1.4 (end of June).

You then have different ways to check out the different websites you visited in terms of the traffic they produced via clicking on the a field in the pie charts:


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Traffic chart
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- "example.com": you will see a detail page of the selected domain
- "Others": you will see a list containing all the other websites you visited in the selected time scope. From there, you can then visit the detail pages, too.


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Data center chart
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- "green": Clicking on this field will give you a list of all websites you visited that are hosted on a green data center declared by GWF
- "grey": Clicking on this field will give you a list of all websites you visited thats data center is not listed as "green" data center by GWF


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Feedback?
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Feel free to let me know about any bugs or ideas for improvements - ideally via email or directly via github.


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Further information
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All further information and explanation can be found via https://ecord.info

The code is open source and can be found via
https://github.com/grenzbotin/eco2rd