Author here, let me know if anyone has questions :D
Tangential note - the thing I'm most proud of about that article is that splash image
To get the logo to contour along the vat, I added a 3d sphere in the position of the vat, pasted puppeer's logo into the texture layer, then made every other part of the sphere transparent
Crazy what you can do in Photoshop nowadays
That's a great idea! Embarrassed to admit I hadn't thought of that :p
I don't imagine it'd make a difference in speed, but should be more efficient in memory (which is indeed a scarce resource on the cheap boxes)
Memory will be similar, but the start time of browser instances will be reduced. Chrome creates a separate management/runtime process for each tab/page.