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by wtallis 3474 days ago
YouTube's videos decompress to much larger quantities of data than Imgur images, but that's not what really affects browser responsiveness, especially when the video decoding is handled by dedicated hardware.

Whether you're displaying a static image or an animated GIF or a H.246 stream, drawing the next frame doesn't require interpreting or JIT compiling any JavaScript, it doesn't require thrashing the garbage collector, and it doesn't require re-computing the page layout.