For some reason resampling artifacts are highly visible to me. Like minor distortion and color inaccuracy, some people see it, some people don't, some people care, some people don't.<p>I used to tell all the authors at techcrunch to resize before uploading, because our theme just loaded the original image and let the browser resize it. Of course this occasionally led to 2-megabyte, 1000px PNGs being rendered at 215px wide, with awful resampling errors making text look awful and taking ages to load besides. No one listened, the fools!<p>These days it seems like there are few situations that demand a "cheaper" resampling method than bilinear. The calculation cost and time are so minor and assets so malleable that it can't possibly end up the bottleneck - not when you have ten or twenty widgets, scripts, and trackers loading as well.<p>It always seemed strange to me, however, that the resampling of images is browser dependent. I guess callouts to the GPU are a bit much when all you need to do is recalculate a bitmap.