As we strive for a more sustainable web, a lot of focus is on energy usage. This makes perfect sense in data centers, where servers run non-stop, but if we shift our focus to the end-user, embodied carbon emitted during manufacture of devices starts to make up a much larger percentage of total emissions. To address this we need to develop web-sites to work well on older devices. This is especially pressing on mobile devices, where older hardware can be very limited in processing power, memory and battery capacity.
Together we’ll look at techniques to test websites on old hardware and frontend development patterns that allow adopting shiny new technology without leaving users of older hardware behind. This reduces the pressure on users to buy new devices, and simultaneously makes our web-sites accessible to a larger user-base.