If we were ever able to blissfully ignore the environmental impacts of our online lives, those days are surely over. Energy-hungry data centers are pushing big tech firms’ emissions in the wrong direction—and pulling the planet-warming potential of the internet right into the discourse along with them. Internet usage accounts for as much as 4% of the greenhouse gases the world emits every year. That puts it on par with, if not cruising above, the aviation industry in terms of its climate impact.
Our individual habits are absolutely no match for those of tech giants, but they can play a role in how we manage our personal footprints. Digital lives contain multitudes—from streaming Netflix to socking family photos away in the cloud—and taken together can account for between 3% and 4% of a person’s individual emissions, according to a 2024 study in Nature Communications. But the seemingly simple act of browsing the web, something many of us do for eight hours or more a day, deserves attention, too.
This begs the question: Does the browser someone uses to search the web really make a difference? Possibly. “To understand the carbon footprint of our digital behavior, we just have to understand where all this energy consumption happens,” says Jens Gröger, a researcher at the Öko-Institut in Germany who looks at the sustainability of internet systems and built a calculator to help people visualize their digital footprint. Browsing, he explains, comes with drains on your computer, in the network, and at the data centers that house all the information.
The topic is especially potent right now because the gap of climate awareness is widening in the world of browsers. On one side, you have offerings like Ecosia and Shift, which market web experiences with energy-saving features and promises to address the impacts of each search or stream. On the other, you have OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Atlas, which has the company’s signature chatbot riding shotgun through the entire browsing experience. (Spoiler: It’s probably more AI than you need.)
A well-built browser can, to some degree, help address all the ways our web-surfing sucks up energy—but so can adopting a few emissions-cutting habits. Here’s a look at what climate-conscious browsing looks like, and a roundup of the tools that help make it easier.
What climate-conscious browsing looks like
No matter what browser you prefer, there are simple steps to take to trim the amount of energy your day-to-day internet diet sips. Little habits—like, say, not having 50 browser tabs open all the time—can help reduce the drain on your laptop or phone, but these easy-to-implement habits can have a big impact.
You use an ad blocker
Websites full of ads don’t only hurt your eyes and your browser’s energy consumption; they also tap into complex tracking models within data centers that target and serve those ads, Gröger explains, which can balloon their footprint. Adding an ad-blocking extension to your existing browser cuts off that energy drain, slashing the consumption of a video-heavy page by 40% on average.
Privacy Badger is a popular choice, and works in pretty much all browsers except Safari. UBlock Origin is also well-regarded, but only works on Firefox and Chrome. Keeping ads out of your face also comes with another benefit: preventing you from buying more stuff you don’t need. “The really worst thing that could happen is that you like an advertisement and buy a new product,” Gröger says.
You avoid cellular data
Mobile networks are much thirstier than home internet. According to Gröger’s calculator, every gigabyte of data you pull through a cell tower consumes 32 watt-hours of energy, and every gigabyte you tap through your land-based connection uses just 2 watt-hours. Fancy an example? A half-hour Zoom call on your laptop on your office network demands 3.2 watt-hours, while FaceTiming from the park for the same amount of time requires 12.1 watt-hours. Practically speaking, make a habit of downloading your podcasts, playlists, and other mobile distractions before you leave home.
You keep your device running as long as possible
One thing that often gets overlooked when talking of digital footprints is the resources that went into making a device in the first place. “If you look at the main environmental impact, you'll find out it's really often the hardware, especially the production of the hardware,” Gröger says. Let’s say, for instance, you buy a laptop and keep it for 5 years: Think of the emissions from making that computer like interest on a mortgage and stretch them across that stretch of time. In that scenario, the production costs are still almost three times those that come from using it. For a smartphone, it’s even steeper: the penalty is four times higher than use.
Extra credit: You use a greener browser
If you want to go the extra mile, you can consider swapping your current browser for one that puts more focus on energy savings, emissions cuts, or both. As with anything, their eco bona fides are not all created equal, so we ranked three of our favorites.
Good: Shift, a browser that tracks usage and offsets emissions
The most-basic experience on the Shift browser will be familiar to most everyday creatures of the internet, because it is built on Google’s Chromium code, which is the basis for the Chrome browser. Shift touts a duo of selling points: customizability and eco-awareness. The first is really only relevant for internet work monsters, in that it allows you to set up the browser as a kind of command center to quickly access the apps and extensions you use most—which is nice, but also not what we’re here to talk about.
Shift’s enviro-flair comes in the form of a meter that tallies the emissions produced by browsing, including the energy that powers data centers, users’ devices, and the production and disposal of those gadgets. The company then neutralizes them by purchasing carbon offsets, including investments in low-carbon cement and forest conservation. The company says these efforts allow it to neutralize all the emissions using the browser creates.
Caveat incoming! Offsetting emissions, it behooves us to remind you, is a nice-but-quite-imperfect enterprise. Audits have found that projects consistently overstate the carbon reductions they promise, and critics caution that they can delay efforts to actively cut emissions. A spokesperson for Shift told one5c that the company is turning attention toward true decarbonization efforts in 2026.
Better: DuckDuckGo, a browser that prioritizes privacy
Opting for a browser that’s focused on user privacy also has knock-on effects for efficiency, mainly because the tools curtail energy-intensive tracking. Brave is a darling in this universe, because it blocks ads, trackers, and other snooping code by default. But the browser version of DuckDuckGo, which shields folks from a range of trackers, has a leg-up thanks to the company’s climate portfolio. It also gets a gold star for allowing users to toggle off its house chatbot.
Last year, the company announced that it had neutralized all emissions since its founding in 2008 through 2020. That’s great, but, like Shift, it achieved that largely through offsets (womp) and funding technologies that pull carbon from the air (womp womp). According to their tally, their measures have accounted for 125% of all the planet-warming potential of the entire operation: data centers, individual search queries, and its remote workforce.
Best: Ecosia, a browser that runs on renewable energy
Ecosia also runs atop the same code as Google Chrome, but its special sauce is about boosting its planet-friendliness as opposed to enabling you to be a productivity beast the way Shift does. The browser has a lot of energy-saving best practices built in, including an ad blocker and the ability to mange those pesky cookie consent pop-ups for you. It also lets you turn off AI Overviews in search results. Huzzah! That’s all good news considering some independent tests found that the browser can sip a bit more juice than its competitors on certain mobile devices.
Ecosia also offers a search engine, and the company makes money when you click on ads—the same way Google does. That cash ends up in three buckets: keep the company running, fund tree-planting projects, and invest in a range of other climate projects, such as the one that allows Ecosia to operate enough solar capacity to cover twice its needs. We see you raising your eyebrows at the tree-planting bit, but here it isn’t used as means to cancel out emissions but rather as an eco-cherry on top.
