Get Out of My Head

It just makes this vague and useless statement:

> Make faster, more accessible, more environmentally friendly websites

And nothing else that I could see to back that up.

Exactly how much does it speed up the website by removing a couple of lines of favicon code from the head? My guess is extremely close to zero. Environmental impact of zero. Flick your lightbulb off for five seconds for a similar benefit, then pat yourself on the back, well done, you just did your bit to save the planet for the next month at least.

Without figures to back it up, this feels like a wannabe influencer padding their resume and wasting our time.

I guess a few drops in the ocean are still drops overall, but nuking the link tags for favicons feels like hoping that wiping the dew off a dinosaur's brow will change the reading on the scale, when the dinosaur's bulk is mostly JavaScript.

> By default, all browsers look for a file /favicon.ico in a site's root directory.

That must be a drop in the ocean compared to all the requests for non-existent favicons thanks to this behavior... (Which can be prevented via [2], apparently!)

> 180x180 is the largest icon size any iOS device requires. Other devices will downscale the image to fit.

Using more data (which uses both energy and is often still paid!) and some compute resources to downscale, which wears out the battery of mobile devices, requiring a swap or incentivizing people to upgrade sooner than they otherwise would. Better reason about the externalities thoroughly when throwing out vague statements like "more environmentally friendly websites"!

By the same author: "why lowercase letters save data" [1], "Show you how I came to the conclusion that title case on hacker news emits the equivalent yearly carbon as a car driving the width of Sri Lanka." – featuring sub-headlines rendered using some squiggly font effect powered by an SVG filter that probably uses enough collective renderer CPU/GPU cycles to drive the same car to the moon and back.

I get and applaud the desire to make the world a better place. But something that people seem to overlook too often with short-sighted initiatives such as this is that one of the most finite resources is human attention. Making somebody feel good about having spent time and effort to implement symbolic/effectively useless measures means that that time and effort won't be available elsewhere. Efficiency matters even in saving the world. (On the other hand, I guess this stunt did get me thinking, proving once again that one of the most efficient ways to find a better solution is to put a wrong statement on the internet :)

[1] https://endtimes.dev/why-lowercase-letters-save-data/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705304

I think there's something to be said for efficiency/no wasted bytes, but better for the environment feels like a major stretch/beside the point...

It's like saying "if we all cut out unnecessary adjectives from our speech, it would save 100k gallons of water per day." Could that be true, maybe? But that's not the thing that makes brevity meaningful/important.

(or: Tongue-in-cheek joke that went over my <head>?)

I hate FB/twitter as much as the next tech-savvy person but accept that my users use those platforms and it's good for my website to show up optimally when they do

    <link rel="icon" href="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgo=">

To the author's credit, that page gets a perfect, 100, Lighthouse performance score.