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This is a really great article, and I really appreciate how it explains the different parts of how JPEG works with so much clarity and interactive visualization

This is a really great article, and I really appreciate how it explains the different parts of how JPEG works with so much clarity and interactive visualizations. However, I do have to give one bit of critique: it also makes my laptop fans spin like crazy even when nothing is happening at all. Now, this is not intended as a critique of the author. I'm assuming that she used some framework to get the results out quickly, and that there is a bug in how that framework handles events and reactivity. But it would still be nice if whatever causes this issue could be fixed. It would be sad if the website had the same issue on mobile and caused my phone battery to drain quickly when 90% of the time is spent reading text and watching graphics that don't change.

lelandfe 7mo ago
It looks like there's some requestAnimationFrame call going on more than once per second. It's definitely an energy intensive tab. But for reference, keeping CNN.com open is more than double that memory pressure on my 5 year old Mac laptop, and it handles both fine. Do your fans really kick in for heavy sites?
- toast0 7mo ago
  https://lite.cnn.com/ https://lite.cnn.com/ is the only version you should load :p
- vanderZwan 7mo ago
  I have an 8 year old laptop that works fine except as long as I don't bother with sites like CNN.com. Heck, I even have a 13 year old laptop that works fine on most sites. Absurd ad-tech and tracking technology is not a motivation for me to upgrade but to avoid badly coded sites.
  - lelandfe 7mo ago
    Hear hear.
Gitechnolo 7mo ago
I share this frustration. It's ironic that an article explaining compression and efficiency requires so much client-side overhead. I've been experimenting with a 'Zero-Framework' approach for a biotech project recently, precisely to avoid this. By sticking to Vanilla JS and native APIs (like Blob for real-time PDF generation), I managed to keep the entire bundle under 20KB with a 0.3s TTI. We often forget that for users on legacy devices or unstable 3G/Edge connections, a 'heavy' interactive page isn't just slow, it's inaccessible. Simplicity shouldn't just be an aesthetic choice, but a core engineering requirement for global equity.

lelandfe 7mo ago

It looks like there's some requestAnimationFrame call going on more than once per second. It's definitely an energy intensive tab. But for reference, keeping CNN.com open is more than double that memory pressure on my 5 year old Mac laptop, and it handles both fine. Do your fans really kick in for heavy sites?

toast0 7mo ago
https://lite.cnn.com/ https://lite.cnn.com/ is the only version you should load :p
vanderZwan 7mo ago
I have an 8 year old laptop that works fine except as long as I don't bother with sites like CNN.com. Heck, I even have a 13 year old laptop that works fine on most sites. Absurd ad-tech and tracking technology is not a motivation for me to upgrade but to avoid badly coded sites.
- lelandfe 7mo ago
  Hear hear.

Gitechnolo 7mo ago

I share this frustration. It's ironic that an article explaining compression and efficiency requires so much client-side overhead. I've been experimenting with a 'Zero-Framework' approach for a biotech project recently, precisely to avoid this. By sticking to Vanilla JS and native APIs (like Blob for real-time PDF generation), I managed to keep the entire bundle under 20KB with a 0.3s TTI. We often forget that for users on legacy devices or unstable 3G/Edge connections, a 'heavy' interactive page isn't just slow, it's inaccessible. Simplicity shouldn't just be an aesthetic choice, but a core engineering requirement for global equity.