svg background on LGM website - issue with lower-end systems

[Louis Desjardins]

It seems that the SVG background makes the website unusable with Firefox 3.6.13 on my Linux workstation at MGH (it scrolls at less than 1 fps). Ad-blocking the image makes it snappy again. It seems to be somewhat better with Firefox 4 on my netbook, but it's still sluggish with the background. It's probably due to an inefficient SVG rendering implementation without a raster cache in Firefox combined with the lack of a fast graphics card. I like SVG as a standard and know this isn't your fault, but maybe it would be better to be pragmatic and use a PNG background until large SVG images are rendered/scrolled at reasonable speed in most browsers on lower-end systems? (reported to me in an private email)