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Discussion on: What's the most wasteful software?

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Zane Milakovic • Edited

Hands down, images.

Every website loads images that are way too big for the viewport, the connection, the dpi of the device, etc.

Or we don’t add width/height making it harder for the device to render correctly.

In both ways it uses more joules of power, as it tries to deal with the fallout. Either scaling a image up or down, grabbing a larger than needed file, or forcing a rerender once it knows the images size.

And how much extra time do we wait to see images download. Or have a image heavy ad pop in late and mess up reading content.

I love the visual nature of the web, but we have never collectively done it in a responsible way. The “few” of us that have, know it adds a lot more responsibility to our plates and eats more of the developers time.

All around, it’s just not as automated and easy as it could be.