In the past you could freeze them and step through frames by right-clicking the image, but I can't remember which browser it was in. It was over a decade ago iirc.
This is so totally messed up. Having an entire DOM with all the associated scripts running live, just for a thumbnail. What if you want to show a dozen of them? What if the user wants to save the image to their machine?
We solve this by taking server side screen shots (currently using slimerjs). We used HTML2Canvas in the past, but it wasn't reliable enough.
It would be great if there was a built-in browser method though, to just get a bitmap of the screen in Javascript. I've heard about security considerations in the past — a prompt for access would not be a problem in our case.
Interesting how this inadvertently showcases modern browsers redrawing the page content based on what has actually changed. Even though each "frame" is a new page, you only see a flash where the new image is being shown or replaced.
Yes. I have a plugin that disables rendering of text in my browser, and all I could see were the images. How do web designers imagine they can get away with this?
I would think that a fairly reliable fix would be "only render markdown links that appear verbatim in the retrieved HTML", perhaps with an additional whitelist for known safe image hosts. The signifiant majority of legitimate images would meet one or both of these criteria, meaning the feature would be mostly unaffected.
This way, the maximum theoretical amount of information exfiltrated would be log2(number of images on page) bits, making it much less dangerous.
They could have put an actual value-add over screenshot programs in there by offering to make a screenshot of the entire page but right now this is a terrible image hoster hooked right into my browser. So tired of this nonsense.
I've seen that problem in chrome before with images; I was trying to read a massive flowchart; the part I was interested in was on the top, and I was busy tracing it with my finger and getting what I needed, when the entire image vanished and was replaced with a placeholder because it timed out while downloading.
This is not just a problem with HTML renderers; JPEG renderers do it too.
4realz are you serious? What is the actual downside of that? As a kid, it made perfect sense to me, and I often would right click the image and press reload or just refresh the whole page. Now whenever images don't load (which is often these days, since cloudfare blocks tor 90% of the time until you load the image in a separate window and fill out their captcha, and even without tor, wireless networks tend to be extremely unreliable), it's not easy to tell whether the page is broken, since it just collapses the spaces where the images would have been.
Further, if you directly view an image and it breaks half way, the browser will hide it and say it's corrupt (and have no "show anyway" button), unless the size wasn't provided, then the browser just thinks it's valid, despite that it could parse the JPEG file and find out that lines of pixels are missing. Calling either of these cases a feature seems very biased.
We aren't even talking about one of the worse problems, which is when a page fails to load, the browser doesn't try to reload it - you have to come back and press reload yourself. I've wasted literally hundreds of hours doing this.
On a low memory computer I had configured FF to not show images unless I alt-clicked them. Together with not using JavaScript this meant using significantly less memory. I suspect browsers still have to have raw bitmaps in memory, which for the 2mb jpegs you are fed everywhere quickly adds up...
There's browser extensions that will convert a whole page as it is loaded in the browser to an image file. For ever-scrolling pages you have to manually stop it.
'Well, turn it on!' is certainly one solution, but of course enabling JavaScript doesn't just let me view images (something HTTP & HTML do just fine anyway), but also enables execution of potential malware, tracking & other nastiness.
Lazy loading images drives me a little bit nuts. Previously with JS, now build into the browser. You scroll down and then you’re waiting for an image, regardless of CDN. The latency of an additional connection is notable. It’s particularly aggravating if you’re have opened a page in a background tabs minutes or hours ago and when you start reading it, the page isn’t really there as expected but still needs to lazy load.
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