ThermalTrace — Website Energy Diagnostics

Tell developers how much power a page drains on a real laptop, and why

Problem

A developer noticed Firefox always showing a speaker icon, traced it by closing pinned tabs one by one to a page holding an audio pathway, and then asked whether it actually hurt battery life. Existing energy tools either measure only CPU or cannot connect a specific tab to hardware modules on Linux desktops, so developers cannot answer 'how much does this page really cost'.

Solution

A cross-platform desktop tool that watches per-tab media, network, and compute activity in the browser and correlates it with system sensor data to estimate relative energy draw per page. It does not claim absolute precision; it gives actionable signals like 'this tab is draining power because of persistent audio, video, polling, or a mining script'.

Users

Developers who care about battery life, front-end engineers on Linux or macOS laptops, and product teams that need to optimize web energy usage.

MVP

Chrome/Firefox extension listing active tabs' media and network events; read system battery discharge rate plus CPU/GPU load; aggregate relative energy ranking per tab; flag suspected persistent audio, video, or high-frequency polling; generate a shareable summary report.

Revenue

Free basic monitoring; subscription adds historical trends, team dashboards, and CI energy regression checks.

Why now

Laptop battery life and always-on AI pages are becoming daily pain points, while vendor-level energy attribution stays coarse. A solo developer can ship a useful relative ranking within weeks using an extension plus local sampling.