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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Ok good, but why do these pictures have to be 2-3MB each? Each one of them would have taken an hour to download just a few years ago (or today, if you live in a less well developed area of the world).

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I wonder if there is a way browsers could preemptively “compress“ (I doubt that’s the correct terminology) prior to downloading? Like somehow grab every nth bit, combine, render and then allow for further requests to refine at user discretion. Wonder if anyone has ever tried something like that.

This used to be a feature of Opera. If you enabled it, it would run all webpages through the Opera proxy, which would downsize everything for you.

The wavelet-based image formats like JPEG 2000 were designed to make that sort of thing possible. They never really caught on, though.

I don't think that's even possible with the byte-ordering of a lot of the formats we use today.

Like the pass extraction of PNG [0] would make it somewhat possible, but you'd need to be dropping packets which you might as well receive. I don't think you'd be able to break after the first pass.

JPEG is probably worse.

However, the super-modern formats that are still gaining popularity, like WebP absolutely do support this. At the core of WebP is block prediction, so a low-bandwidth application might actually assume the values of certain blocks so it doesn't need to fetch them.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-PNG-20031110/#4Concepts.Encod...

I know that Opera had this feature once and Google Chrome on Android does this via it's "Lite mode":

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2392284?co=GENIE.Pl...

This feature is built into Jpeg images, though most image editors don't save them with this enabled by default. People call them progressive jpegs.

https://www.thewebmaster.com/dev/2016/feb/10/how-progressive...

Used to be really common around the late 90s/early 2000s...

I was downloading MP3s to my MP3 player with a 16MB san over ISDN circa 2000. For most people in the US it hasn’t taken hours to download an MP3 for over a decade maybe 2.

Ca 2000 will always be just a few years ago to me.

Besides, there are areas in Germany today where you can't get >1Mbit connections.

Yeah People have to justify the cost of a their retina screens

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