Note that this currently only works with Firefox. Support for Chrome and Internet Explorer is not yet available and it’s not yet known when it will be available.

The new Battery Status API allows you from a web page to access information about the battery status of the device rendering it. It is not only useful in order to show the current status but to implement battery status dependent logic e.g. increasing polling interval using Ajax or disabling animations in order to preserve the battery, or auto-saving in case the device goes out of power, prevent the user from performing long running operation which might not be able to finish because of the low remaining battery level.

First we’ll create the HTML and CSS in order to get an empty battery display looking like this:

The HTML code couldn’t be simpler. We just need a battery div:

<div id="battery"></div>

Now we need to display a border around the div and a smaller rectangle after it:

.battery:after {
    background-color: #fff;
    border: 2px solid #000;
    content: "";
    display: block;
    height: 16px;
    position: absolute;
    right: -6px;
    top: 6px;
    width: 6px;
}
.battery {
    background-color: #fff;
    border: 2px solid #000;
    height: 32px;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
    position: relative;
    width: 100px;
}

Then we need to display a battery level within the battery display:

<div id="battery"><div id="battery-level"></div></div>

And we just need to add some CSS:

.battery .battery-level {
    background-color: #666;
    height: 100%;
}

By setting the width of .battery-level in pixels (or in percent which is the same since the element is 100 pixels wide) to the battery level in percents, we’ll get the right display:

Of course, one would expect our battery level display to show the level in a different color depending whether the battery is almost empty or not. So let’s introduce three CSS classes which will show the level in green, yellow or red:

Using the following CSS code:

.battery .battery-level.high {
    background-color: #66CD00;
}
.battery .battery-level.medium {
    background-color: #FCD116;
}
.battery .battery-level.low {
    background-color: #FF3333;
}

Before we move to the HTML5 part, let’s also display the battery level as text, by setting it as text on the battery-level element and by adding the following css rule:

.battery .battery-level {
    text-align: center;
}

It then looks like this:

Now we’re almost done… All we need is what’s actually the main topic of this post: to get the battery level data using HTML5. For this we need to use the new Battery Status API.

The Battery Status API provides access the battery information through navigator.battery which implement the BatteryManager interface. This interface provides the following information:

• whether the battery is currently charging
• the charging time
• the discharging time
• the battery level

Additionally, it also provides events you can listen to:

• onchargingchange
• onchargingtimechange
• ondischargingtimechange
• onlevelchange

We will not use the events for now and just show the battery level when the page was loaded:

The JavaScript code to work with this API is pretty straight forward:

var battery = navigator.battery;
var level    = battery.level * 100;
var batteryLevel = jQuery('.battery .battery-level');
batteryLevel.css('width', level + '%');
batteryLevel.text(level + '%');
if (battery.charging) {
    batteryLevel.addClass('charging');
} else if (level > 50) {  
    batteryLevel.addClass('high');  
} else if (level >= 25 ) {  
    batteryLevel.addClass('medium');  
} else {  
    batteryLevel.addClass('low');  
}

If you want to update the battery level display as the battery charges and discharges:

Here’s the JavaScript code:

function updateBatteryDisplay(battery) {
	var level = battery.level * 100;
	var batteryLevel = jQuery('.battery .battery-level');
	batteryLevel.css('width', level + '%');
	batteryLevel.text(level + '%');
	if (battery.charging) {
	    batteryLevel.addClass('charging');
	    batteryLevel.removeClass('high');  
	    batteryLevel.removeClass('medium');  
	    batteryLevel.removeClass('low');  
	} else if (level > 50) {  
	    batteryLevel.addClass('high');  
	    batteryLevel.removeClass('charging');
	    batteryLevel.removeClass('medium');  
	    batteryLevel.removeClass('low');  
	} else if (level >= 25 ) {  
	    batteryLevel.addClass('medium');  
	    batteryLevel.removeClass('charging');
	    batteryLevel.removeClass('high');  
	    batteryLevel.removeClass('low');  
	} else {  
	    batteryLevel.addClass('low');  
	    batteryLevel.removeClass('charging');
	    batteryLevel.removeClass('high');  
	    batteryLevel.removeClass('medium');  
	}
}

var battery = navigator.battery;
updateBatteryDisplay(battery);
battery.onchargingchange = function () {
    updateBatteryDisplay(battery);
};
battery.onlevelchange = function () {
    updateBatteryDisplay(battery);
};

So the Battery Status API is a very powerful and useful API which is very easy to use. Now let’s hope it will soon be available in all major browsers !