I guess everybody has their own preconceptions of what's wasteful.
I grew up in the era of 14.4k modems, so I'm used to thinking that network bandwidth is many, many orders of magnitude more scarce and valuable than CPU time.
To me, it's wasteful to download an entire image over the Internet if you can easily compute it on the client.
Think about all the systems you're activating along the way to download that image: routers, servers, even a disk somewhere far away (if it's not cached on the server)... All that just to avoid one pass of processing on data you already had in RAM on the client.
I have the same perspective regarding bandwidth, but I also consider any client to be running on a computer at least ten years old and at least three OS revisions behind.
I like to consider myself a guest on a client CPU, GPU, and RAM. I should not eat all their food, leave an unflushed turd in their toilet, and hog the remote control. Be a thoughtful guest that encourages feelings of inviting me back in the future.
Load fast, even when cell coverage is marginal. Low memory so a system doesn't grind to a halt from swapping. Animate judiciously because it's polite. Good algorithms, because everyone notices when their cursor becomes jerky.
"Mips – processing cycles, computer power – had always been cheaper than bandwidth. The computers got cheaper by the week and the phone bills stayed high by the month." - The Star Fraction, 1995
each visitor brings their own cpu to do this work whereas the server bandwidth is finite
I'm confused though.
If the goal is to optimize for server bandwidth, wouldn't you still want to send the already-blurred photo? Surely that will be a smaller image size than the pre-blurred full res photo (while also reducing client-side CPU/OS requirements).
We don’t know the aspect ratio of the client window before-hand and on web, there are a lot of possibilities! So if any pre-blurred image is meant to peek out around the edges, those edge widths are dynamic. Otherwise, a low-res blurred image plus high-res non-blurred edges might be less bandwidth if overhead is low enough.
Okay but how do you compute an image? How would your browser -- or any other client software -- know what's the hero image of a blog that you never visited before, for example?
I feel like I am missing something important in your comment.
The article describes computational method of rendering frosted glass effect. You can achieve the same thing by rendering the effect once (then upload to a sever) and have client download the rendered image. Or you can compute the frosted glass effect. What's better? That's the argument.
It's like people forgot what graceful degradation and progressive enhancement is.
Ah, sorry, I didn't make it as far in the article.
IMO it really depends on the numbers. I'd be OK if my client downloads 50KB extra data for the already-rendered image but I'll also agree that from 100KB and above it is kind of wasteful and should be computed.
With the modern computing devices we all have -- including 3rd world countries, where a cheap Android phone can still do a lot -- I'd say we should default to computation.