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by acdha 1016 days ago
Yes but you have to pay a LOT in bandwidth for a <10% savings to be worth the cost of supporting an entire extra toolchain and dealing with the support issues (better now but it took a decade not to have “I right-clicked and now I can’t open it” reports from users). Google and Facebook serve that much but most people do not.
4 comments
dvhh 1016 days ago
For some datacenters, that 10% saving would be worth the effort and could push back costly maintenance to increase egress bandwidth.

And I would argue that beside Facebook, the end user right clicking and saving the image for them to use in an inappropriate manner ( downloading the image is not the issue, using it without permission would cause copyright infringement ) would be an issue for some of the website that are hosting the image.

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acdha 1016 days ago
> For some datacenters, that 10% saving would be worth the effort and could push back costly maintenance to increase egress bandwidth.

No argument - my point was simply that very few sites on the web fall into that category.

> And I would argue that beside Facebook, the end user right clicking and saving the image for them to use in an inappropriate manner

That’s only true for a subset of sites, only to the extent that this wasn’t covered by fair use, and it came up enough that it was a common objection.

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dgacmu 1016 days ago
We use webp internally for storing very small images that are cropped out of larger images (think individual bugs on a big strip). Webp lets us get them small enough we can store the binary image data directly in postgres which was a lovely simplification.

(We evaluated it for storing a bunch of other stuff but didn't find it worth the compatibility and need to transcode problems)

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Ennergizer 1016 days ago
From experience, in many cases it's 50% savings when done correctly and considerably makes the app\website faster on large images when you have 20-50 images to load on one page.
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acdha 1016 days ago
Interesting - I’ve never seen that much compared to mozjpeg and other optimized codecs. We also lazy-load large images.
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afavour 1016 days ago
> the cost of supporting an entire extra toolchain and dealing with the support issues

Why I love features like Fastly's Image Optimizer. No extra work on our end but we get the bandwidth savings https://www.fastly.com/products/image-optimization

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