Header image crossfade CPU utilization

[mbit]

Hi,
When browsing the forums, whenever a header crossfade occurs, my Firefox CPU utilization jumps to 40-50%. The same in IE9.
I’m not able to play games (like BM, for example) with an open BM forum tab on my second monitor. I just get a huge fps drop every few seconds.
I think this amount of CPU time used to make the crossfade happen is not worth the result.

Could you somehow optimize the crossfade (by a factor of at least 10) or provide a cookie-backed option to disable crossfading?
Alternatively provide workaround instructions to disable the crossfade clientside, like blocking a javascript file with a browser addon.

System Specs:
Athlon64 6000+, 2x 3 Ghz
Geforce GTX 660Ti
While this system isn’t quite high-end, it can handle BM quite well, but struggles on rendering the website. Something is wrong here.

Also tried on my laptop, (i5 Sandy Bridge, 2410M, 4 HT cores).
CPU utilization reaches 4-5% here. Doesn’t hurt that much, but still too much for a crossfade that most people don’t even pay attention to all the time.

[sersoft]

this is probably due to the new html5 standard, which focuses on transferring CPU intensive tasks from the server to the client, take youtube for example, flash based youtube works great, but in html5 it uses 20 times more CPU

in short, it’s time to get a core i5

[mbit]

You’re probably right saying it’s caused by html5 (or the slow implementation).
In that case, however, I would urge web designers not to use the feature until there are implementations in every major browser doing this efficiently.
Something must go terribly wrong there, even I could write code that does this more efficiently. Perhaps it’s just an fps limitation missing in the script or something. I don’t know much about web scripting.

[sersoft]

Those things should run faster in Chrome, but Firefox has by far the best Adblock implementation, so you can easily prevent them from rendering at all.