I’d like to bump this topic because we’re seeing Gravatar requests noticeably increase render time for users on high-latency connections. One customer has clients with >800 ms TCP latency, and in that environment the additional third-party round trips make the UI feel significantly slower.
As a workaround, I disabled avatars via the configuration variable for this customer. However, I still believe the initials bubbles/circles add real value in terms of discriminability and readability (quickly scanning “who did what” in lists, comments, tasks, etc.).
More broadly, I’d argue that an enterprise application like Axon Ivy ideally should not depend on a third-party service for something as trivial as user avatars - especially one that adds latency, can be blocked by corporate firewalls/proxies, and introduces an external availability/privacy dependency.
