我需要保留对预加载图像的引用，还是可以对其进行垃圾回收？

Question

Every example of image preloaders that I find in books or online contains some form of a cache array of all the preloaded images.

I've created a DEMO page that if you open the console, you can clearly see it preloads images even if they get garbage collected.

Is there any reason why all the other preloaders keep a reference to the preloaded images, or is it unnecessary?

Answer 1

In general, it's not useful to keep a cache of loaded images since the browser already do that automatically. But if those libraries you mentioned do it, they might have a reason. Maybe for animation purposes since loading the image from JavaScript memory might be faster than loading it from the browser cache.