So, this raises the question: should this become standard practice from now on. If not, why not?
Poor headline though.
An outdated computer/browsers sucks at resizing jpegs. A two year old high end Android smartphone too.
Minimizing HTTP requests, avoiding FOUC, using only one version of JQuery (or, even better, none), using CSS sprites... there are countless optimisations which are more important and seldom used.
Retina is a buzzword and a buzzword resolution. If you target the 0.1% rich hipsters, yeah, it's important. If you've real users browsing in 1024x768 on a four year old laptop and a 2Mbps broadband, it's not.
When Amazon'll use Retina img, that's when it'll be a standard practice.
I have a hard time believing it would be a significant issue to do a 2x image resize, especially if you provide exact image dimensions in your img tag to start with to avoid the renderer having to wait until the image has downloaded to layout the page properly. In any case, I think someone should do some benchmarks to see what kind of an issue it is in practice.
Either way, it's not a bad thing to be forward thinking with design. The amount of 'retina' devices in the world is growing exponentially. At the moment, it's largely an Apple problem, but with high DPI panels now on the market it'll soon be industry-wide.
Old people with an iPad3 won't see the difference between a non retina and a retina website. They'll see which is the fastest and the easiest to use (because usually, pixel perfect guys are not too smart about UI.)
Retina-ready is a scam. We have neither the tools (SVG support too weak, no <picture> element, no good navigator.connection...) to provide a meaningful retina experience while respecting other users.
Speed trumps "beauty". Most often.
Anyone old or young that cares about speed of browsing will be running the latest browser, with good upscaling...
Retina isn't a scam, however putting an SEO spin on the need to even consider preparing for the future is
IME the best bandwidth optimization is an adblocker :)
Most of us don't care about those anymore. Anything older than IE8 is out in modern web design.
>A two year old high end Android smartphone too.
Those matter even less. Two year old is near end-of-life, since people get new contracts. And Android, despite the higher market share sees less web usage (of the 20-80 scale), probably because more of them are sold to less tech-savvy users.