Besides saving the bandwidth, one of the main reasons we thumbnail our images on the web is because we want them look clear even if they are in small sizes – we simply don’t trust the way browsers re-sample images: for the screenshots above taken from Onslaught, the later one (a big image down-sized by CSS instead of thumbnailing on the server side) looks far more worse than the first one (which the image itself is already size small on Flickr).

I have no idea how come IE and Firefox guys are working so hard trying to make webpages looks nicer by smoothing the fonts, they’d all forget how important images mean in webpages now days. Trying to save CPU resources I think. The only browser that re-sample images nicely is Safari 3 beta for Windows, A.F.A.I.K.