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The present and potential future of progressive image rendering

Jake Archibald · 15 Oct 2025

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Progressive image rendering is not a substitute for keeping image file sizes small.

    Their wordsIt certainly isn't an alternative to taking care over your image sizes.

  2. Our reading

    Using progressive decoding to let a browser cancel an in-flight image request once it has enough resolution will not work, because of the lag between each step.

    Their wordsThe problem is there's significant lag between each of these steps, to the point where it's very likely that you'll receive megabytes of data you don't need, per image, before the response is successfully cancelled.

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