I’ve always thought that Progressive JPEGs should be used more often than they are. In my experience they usually end up being a tiny bit smaller than standard (though not enough to matter on today’s Internet), plus it really does seem like showing a low-res image that resolves into a sharper one would be more useful than slowly watching the image fill in from one edge. Well, it turns out that people really dislike those initially-blurry images. First impressions are important, and even when the sharpening is fast, it makes the viewer’s brain work harder to process the image because it has to do it twice.
Progressive image rendering: Good or evil? – Web Performance Today
Which offers a better user experience: baseline or progressive images? New neuroscientific research from Radware has the answer.
