The problem Peeking Emissions solves

With the exponential increase of digitization in today's modern world, and with every single one us transferring millions of Bytes worth of data everyday, it has become equally crucial to adopt greener alternatives in our online lives as our offline ones. Our browser extension tracks your carbon footprint based on the amount of data you transfer on a website, and using this data gathered from millions of users like you, ranks websites on the basis of their carbon footprint on our webpage, so the next time you're feeling like binge watching a series or two, you can also be environmentally friendlier by choosing a greener alternative. It isn't a money making machine, rather it is a means of awareness about being mindful of the impact of your online presence on our world.

We have focussed more on the carbon emissions caused at the time of loading webpages, since these are the ones that are most overlooked. No other extension, nor website tracks these and over time, with a user base as large as the people surfing the net everyday, these apparent 'tiny' emissions compound to ludicrous amounts of CO2.

Challenges we ran into

If technical roller coasters were a thing, the journey of making this project would best describe riding one.

The first challenge we encounetered was familiarizing ourselves with the vast utilities and intense depth of browser extension development. Learning about service workers, background scripts, DevTools, extension APIs and a plethora of other utilities in such a short amout of time was both enthralling and utterly exhausting.

The second challenge came when we had to figure out a way to calculate the amount of data transferred without enroaching the privacy of users. The first thought that came to mind was setting up a proxy server and monitoring the network requests, but since we couldn't do that, we had to cleverly use event listeners to monitor when the DOM content of the page loaded and OnLoad events to find out when the page finished parsing all the static files. Then we simply used some formulae referred from research papers to find out the CO2 footprint in grams.