Retarded. That’s all I can say.
It kind of is.
I think the idea was originally that while browsers, client-side, can also resize the image
you have little control of how the browser does the resizing or the quality of the resizing code.
The idea is that if you have specialized server-side resizing code you get to control HOW the resizing is done and can provide better quality of the resulting resized image.
Ok, but
1, browser resizing code is perfectly fine and indistinguishable in quality for 99.999% of all images and also 99.999% of all end users can not tell the images apart if they have been resized server-side or in the browser itself. Even if you show them side by side.
2, So instead of serving a static image, you now burn cycles server-side to resize the image EVERY SINGLE TIME you serve it to a client.
3, To lessen the expense of 2, you solve that by putting a cache in front of the rescaler , server-side, so you only rescale the same image to the same dimensions once.
4, Virtually no images on the web needs the 100% best possible rescaling every single time and for every single image.
5, Virtually zero end users care
6, Virtually zero end users could even tell if one pixel in their vacation photo got the slightly "wrong" color due to poor client-side browser rescaling.
7, nowadays a lot of the time the browser use the same general codebase for its rescaling code as these faggots use in their server-side rescaler anyway.
(how many different rescalers do you think there are and how many server-implementors and browser implementors decide to write their own rescalers instead of just using the standard library that everyone uses?)
Why do this?
It is essentially autism. Rescaling picture autism. For pictures where it doesn't matter 99.999% of the time and where in 99.999% of the remaining cases they both use the identical codebase anyway.
Think of it like this, you know the audiophile autists that duct tape magic crystals to their loudspeaker cables because it makes the sound better?
Imagine this kind of autist instead designing how to rescale images before they can be show to the end user in the browser window on his shitty laptop?
That is exactly what is going on here and why they do it.
