Get Out of My Head
25 comments
·April 16, 2025jihadjihad
> more environmentally friendly websites
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.
Trasmatta
Great analogy. I get, perhaps unreasonably, irked by these types of micro optimizations that have no impact on anything. Every webpage in the world could remove everything from the header, and there wouldn't even the tiniest percentage of a percentage of a percentage impact on the world's energy usage.
dbattaglia
I know it’s cynical but it feels like people make these statements so they can feel like they are making some difference, while in actuality all they are doing is signaling their political belief system. Not a fan.
edent
What's wrong with signalling one's political beliefs?
readthenotes1
I wonder if the virtue signaling will actually do more damage to the environment as people read the fairly useless pose and comment on the inconsequentiality?
_kush
Do these tags really weigh down the webpages? I don’t see any noticeable differences in loading times on websites with these tags vs websites with lesser or no tags.
adamkochanowicz
They don't. Removing these tags will not result in any meaningful increase in page load time honestly. This is especially because most don't actually load up any linked file. Their weight is just the characters they are typed out in.
It's an informative webpage but it's not very effective optimization imo.
boesboes
Well, each byte is one I guess? At least before compression.
Reminds me of a colleague who argued for tabs over spaces, because it saved bandwidth.
lxgr
> You don't need this code!
> 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 :)
tayiorrobinson
> A single .ico file can contain multiple icons with different dimensions.
and as far as I know, no browser will download partial ico files. So the bytes saved by not including a link tag is immediately reversed by the browser having to download your 16x, 32x, 64x, 128x and 256x ico when it only wants the 16x
ikerino
I'm curious about the "environmentally friendly" promise. How meaningful/measurable would removing these tags be?
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>?)
adamkochanowicz
It's akin to the days when people used google clones that used a black background to supposedly save on display energy use.
Cheer2171
> supposedly
My battery life increases 25% or more on dark mode.
butler14
Honestly if you're removing meta tags from the html of a page for page speed/server space/bandwidth/environmental benefits -- it's time to do something else
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
ceving
I like this favicon:
<link rel="icon" href="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgo=">lxgr
Now here's a trick that might actually save some resources by reducing the amount of useless HTTP requests. I wish the article mentioned this instead!
velcrovan
…At the cost of having to add `img-src data:;` to your CSP, which is unsafe.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/94993/is-includ...
lxgr
How is that unsafe exactly?
zamadatix
It's interesting the favicon section recommends removing a few bytes of text in favor of using the default favicon location and then follows that up by recommending packing every scale of the icon into that file on the basis the overhead of the image data is irrelevantly small.
xnx
I would think of this type of "optimization" as benign, but I think it's worse than that because it distracts and takes time and attention from what to do instead like using Lighthouse.
To the author's credit, that page gets a perfect, 100, Lighthouse performance score.
skerit
The "meta tags" section has some weird opinions, but also a lot of interesting information.
croes
Less JS would have a greater effect
null
This website is missing a very important piece of information: why the hell you'd go to the trouble of making these changes.
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.