{"id":852,"date":"2021-04-07T10:00:28","date_gmt":"2021-04-07T09:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/sustainable-software\/?p=852"},"modified":"2021-04-06T14:22:58","modified_gmt":"2021-04-06T13:22:58","slug":"build-a-green-browser-extension","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/sustainable-software\/build-a-green-browser-extension\/","title":{"rendered":"Build a ‘Green’ Browser Extension"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credits<\/strong>: This browser extension was inspired by Adebola Adeniran who built a very useful\u00a0extension<\/a>\u00a0for Chrome and Edge to track COVID country by country via API calls. He wrote an excellent\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0about it. Thanks also to Asim Hussain who told me about these APIs as well. And thanks to the\u00a0Energy Lollipop extension<\/a> for California emissions for their ‘dot’ color extension marker idea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you’ve never built a browser extension, it’s surprisingly fun and addictive. Have little repetitive tasks that could be helped by having something right at your fingertips, pinned to your browser bar? How about a little dot that can tell you, at a glance, whether your geographic region is undergoing a moment of heavy C02 usage on the electric grid? Would it help you make a decision on whether or not to run your clothes dryer?<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Asim Hussain’s\u00a08 Principles of Sustainable Software Development<\/a>, one of the goals of a ‘Green Developer’ is to help users make decisions that can have a meaningful impact on carbon impact. In addition, a Green Developer should be mindful of the carbon impact of their software itself. A carbon extension, hosted locally and only making ad-hoc API calls might be a particularly sustainable idea.<\/p>\n

Beware! Not all browser extensions are ‘green’ by default. Some seem to consume a lot of resources.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s build a small ‘green’ browser extension! We will be inspired by Adebola’s extension to call\u00a0tmrow<\/a>‘s\u00a0electricityMap API<\/a>\u00a0to track regional electricity usage, so that you can have a reminder right in your browser about how heavy your region’s electricity usage is so that you can make educated judgement calls on your activities based on this information.<\/p>\n

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Curious about the potential environmental impact of your decisions? Take\u00a0this quiz<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’ve created some sample code to get you up and running quickly:<\/p>\n

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git clone https:\/\/github.com\/jlooper\/carbon-trigger-extension\/tree\/start && cd carbon-trigger-extension\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
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