I wrote a Chrome plugin that does exactly this. I was living in an apartment with a heavily metered connection, and wanted a way to block large header images an

I wrote a Chrome plugin that does exactly this. I was living in an apartment with a heavily metered connection, and wanted a way to block large header images and 40mb GIFs. The extension let's you set a maximum image size, and uses the HTTP Range header to request only that much of the image - it's pretty naive but it works. Here is an example from Facebook, with the limit set to 10kB: http://imgur.com/a/l2qGz http://imgur.com/a/l2qGz Unfortunately browsers don't do anything smart in terms of requesting progressive images, as there isn't an easy way to figure out how much of an image should be downloaded. So even on a 320x400px low end mobile device, you'll still end up downloading the whole the 2000x2000 header image - the only difference is it'll appear quicker as it is progressively rendered. https://github.com/lucaspiller/block-large-media https://github.com/lucaspiller/block-large-media