Quite a few of you have been asking why ecocho is not on a black background to save energy (like Blackle). It’s a valid question, but one that we weighed up and decided against. In actuality a black screen saves very, very, very, very little for a search engine type site, where visitors stay for only a minute or two.
Here’s some science:
energy use on google.com (1 hour) = 49.0W
energy use on blackle.com (1 hour) = 46.6W
You can find this information here: http://ozlabs.org/~jk/diary/misc/blackle-lcd.diary/. You’d have to stay on ecocho for 1 full hour to save 3 watts. White is still a lot easier on the eyes to read, plus we feared that making ecocho on a black background would be too much of a change from Yahoo and Google for most of our users. We figured that getting more users, to grow more trees, was ultimately the greater good.
Having said all that, we are working on a black version of ecocho for those who want to squeeze the extra power savings. This should be available from the preferences section of ecocho (once it launches) very, very soon!!
Hope that helps!
Alex
Ecocho
Ecocho's Weblog 