It's a 25-year old website and most people were on slow dial-up connection. No one would've stuck around for 17 images to be pre-loaded.

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viraptor 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's not what preload is for. You don't wait for the extra images on the first page. You start loading them after the page is complete, so that the next page loads faster.

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missingdays 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So people waited for 20 seconds to load each page?

	▲	codingdave 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. The tolerance for slow-loading pages has shrunk dramatically since the early days of the web. Admittedly, 20 seconds was pushing it and people tried to reduce image sizes and such things to make it faster. But I recall in the late 90s, when I was selling CMS software to IBM, they had a rule that all pages needed to load within 3 seconds, and that was considered fast in those days.