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

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 webpages 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 measurements with OLED smartphones, Chameleon is able to reduce average system power consumption for web browsing by 41 percent and is able to reduce display power consumption by 64 percent without introducing any noticeable delay.