Thanks, Interesting idea. I'm a little sceptical of the performance improvement, but I suppose that depends what we mean by performance.
Your strategy essentially trades a one time computation and DOM mutation with a continuous but lighter one with some added overhead. In this case I suspect the total power performance is worse over time; _however_ latency and UX should be _better_, since it removes the relationship between total comments on the page and the time to render avatars, which is currently about 100ms for this page on my machine.
I'm definitely biased towards preferring a one time change and making it as efficient as possible, but when the input has a high enough ceiling I can see how your strategy would make more sense - I'm not quite sure where I stand on HN threads - but thankfully this is just a user script so we can make our own choices :)
Yes! it did cross my mind, I was just more familiar with canvas API so I cracked on with it... but I suppose encoding a simple format like bitmap would be trivial, almost like being able to access the canvas pixel buffer but with a lower overhead.
This thread is a good perf test, I might give it a quick go.
Also as others mentions the pixelation style thing is now finally fully cross browser supported, which should make it easier to achieve nearest neighbour upscaling for url encoding.
[edit]
I underestimated how involved image format headers are!
Your strategy essentially trades a one time computation and DOM mutation with a continuous but lighter one with some added overhead. In this case I suspect the total power performance is worse over time; _however_ latency and UX should be _better_, since it removes the relationship between total comments on the page and the time to render avatars, which is currently about 100ms for this page on my machine.
I'm definitely biased towards preferring a one time change and making it as efficient as possible, but when the input has a high enough ceiling I can see how your strategy would make more sense - I'm not quite sure where I stand on HN threads - but thankfully this is just a user script so we can make our own choices :)