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Comment by insertnickname | Hacker News Reader

Loading this page with JS disabled, all the images are blurred. Loading it with JS, there's a fancy fade-in animation on the images. What is the point of this? Why would you intentionally distort the images for people who browse with JS disabled?

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It's a simple approach to lazy loading, so that you only download the images you actually want to view on a phone as you scroll to them.

(I also pick the right kind of image depending on your display DPI, and resize them on the back-end, but that's beside the point here)

I get a _lot_ of mobile visitors, and mobile bandwidth is expensive, so I'm considerate to them - folk with JavaScript disabled know how to re-enable it to view the images, and are a very minute percentage of my page views.

Sorry! :)

FYI I also get the blurry images in Firefox's reader mode. (I had to go back to the original to see if that was intentional when I saw the first screenshot ;-)

Yeah, well, that's actually JavaScript that (go figure) strips away all the event handlers :)

The images did not load at all for me the first time I went to the page. There were just blank spaces at odd places and it wasn't until halfway through the article that I realized there were supposed to be images. I also saw some raw markdown-looking text like "[foo][f]", though other formatting and links rendered correctly. I'm using Firefox 49 on Ubuntu 16.04.

I just refreshed again and everything seems to be working now.

For the same reason that you would intentionally clutter up the document with HTML markup tags for people who are browsing on a teletype machine.

because almost everyone has JavaScript enabled because websites are broken with it disabled…

Because web developers deliberately break websites...

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