Back when Opera was a worthy browser, around 2000, it had various bandwidth-saving and CPU-saving controls. In particular, it had buttons to prevent loading of large images, and IIRC for gif autoplay.

Vivaldi is worthy successor and have those toggles built-in.

and with such a slow GUI that you couldn't run in on those low performance devices even with those toggles enabled...

what? I use vivaldi on a nine year old desktop and its fine.

Send a HEAD request. If the file size is over the threshold, don't load it without user consent.

A perfect idea for the people who almost certainly aren’t using “cheaper hardware devices”.

I wonder why nobody introduced a "Accept-Max-Size" request header?

Chrome is toying with custom accept header[1] types but they're used by servers to request information from clients, which is completely missing the point in my opinion.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Content_ne...

Pretty sure this is part of uBlocks standard features.

Honestly it's getting a bit too noticeable how a full-featured adblocker is converging on just a way to let the user take back control over the user agent.