Chameleon: A Color-Adaptive Web Browser for Mobile OLED Displays

TL;DR

Chameleon is a novel web browser designed for OLED mobile devices that adaptively optimizes web page colors to significantly reduce power consumption while maintaining user experience.

Contribution

It introduces a color-adaptive rendering approach for web browsers on OLED displays, combining motivational studies, design, and implementation to achieve substantial power savings.

Findings

Reduces system power consumption by 41%

Decreases display power consumption by 64%

Maintains no noticeable delay in web browsing

Abstract

Displays based on organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology are appearing on many mobile devices. Unlike liquid crystal displays (LCD), OLED displays consume dramatically different power for showing different colors. In particular, OLED displays are inefficient for showing bright colors. This has made them undesirable for mobile devices because much of the web content is of bright colors. To tackle this problem, we present the motivational studies, design, and realization of Chameleon, a color adaptive web browser that renders web pages with power-optimized color schemes under user-supplied constraints. Driven by the findings from our motivational studies, Chameleon provides end users with important options, offloads tasks that are not absolutely needed in real-time, and accomplishes real-time tasks by carefully enhancing the codebase of a browser engine. According to measure-ments with OLED smartphones, Chameleon is able to re-duce average system power consumption for web browsing by 41% and reduce display power consumption by 64% without introducing any noticeable delay.