[Dylan16807]

What's your threshold for significance on image decoding speed? I bet making it 4x slower would be negligible in the vast majority of cases.

The computational power you need for image decoding is extremely narrow and easy to make safe. You need some mathematical operations and some loops. You don't need any APIs or data structures. Mask off all the pointers and you can have have a provably safe interpeter/compiler that runs pretty fast.

[astrange]

Remember that 4x slower means (at least) 4x worse battery drain on a phone. In the modern internet there basically is never any excuse to waste resources.

[Dylan16807]

But it's also on a phone where saving data transfer can give you huge battery benefits. And it's not intentional waste; having this fallback doesn't stop browsers from adding native decoders.