Squoosh: Make images smaller using best-in-class codecs, right in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Squoosh: Make images smaller using best-in-class codecs, right in the browser

squoosh.app

53 pointsTomte35 comments

Squoosh does not use best-in-class codecs [1]. Lossless PNG compression is 5-15% worse on average and lossy PNG compression (color quantization) is limited to PNG-8, which is not enough to maintain image quality. Lossy JPEG compression is only tuned for 4:2:0 chroma subsampling and causes blurring of fine details because trellis quantization is guided simply by the variance in DCT domain.

[1] https://optimage.app/benchmark

It's marketing hyperbole, no one really believes it's the absolute best-in-class.

The idea of this open source app from Google is to demonstrate a real world use case of porting legacy native code to the web via webassembly

Exactly and if you need to quickly optimise some background JPEG to save 400Kb , because the designers / developers haven't optimised the flipping images.

The quality of a codec is easy to measure, and saying that it measures higher than others is not a hyperbole, but a lie. If you take something that's hard to compare, like developer effectiveness, and say he's the best, then it can be called a hyperbole.

I tested it yesterday, and it seems good enough for me.

I'd love to use ImageOptim, but I don't have a Mac, and the web plans are too expensive for optimizing maybe two images every three months.

Try hackintosh it’s great fun if you like OS X

If you are a masochist, it’s for sure fun. If not, you really won’t like your installation constantly breaking, not being updatable without great trouble and just not being able to be relied upon in general.

Not to mention this is illegal.

eh... illegal, depends on how you got access to MacOS and on your jurisdiction as well as the reasons for doing it. (Research, for instance.) The other points, I agree with 100%.

I strongly agree on the former, but wasn't illegal only for criminal law? This would be a licence violation with a fine from civil law, no?

I'm not is lawyer though, just surprised about the illegal term in this context

No, "illegal" is "unlawful" and also covers civil law (or any other body of law).

The word you're looking for is "criminal".

It's a TOS violation, and Apple does make things like imessage a pain, but it's not illegal, provided you got the installer from the mac store and not off the internet.

You could try the online version of Imageoptim (with not as many options) here:

https://imageoptim.com/online

Thank you!

Is that even linked from somewhere on the ImageOptim site?

It is poor etiquette to not include a disclosure of your relationship to the link provided.

Previous discussion of optimage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18254507

JPEG-XL: Next Generation Image Compression Codec Open source / Royality free NEW public software repostory https://gitlab.com/wg1/jpeg-xl

Didn’t this come out a couple of years ago? Is there a reason we are seeing it again now?

JPEG XT, JPEG XS, JPEG XL are all for completely different use cases and built with different technology. XT and XS are more mature standards, but less appealing for the internet use case than XL.

They have also made a talk about the the design process of the squoosh webapp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipNW6lJHVEs

How does it compare to Squash -- other than being browser based?

https://www.realmacsoftware.com/squash/

It has more tools and a GUI.

Squash is in the AppStore, so it can't contain any GPL-licensed compressors.

For some actual thing which you can use in your projects to automatically optimise images, check this:

https://www.gumlet.com

I really like the UI design and PWA hints to add this to your mobile. Great work.

I usually use TinyPNG, but its not open source, and does send the images server-side, so shouldn't be used for sensitive files.

mb != MB.

Given that literally nobody has ever needed, nor will they ever need, to talk about file sizes in millibits, there is no ambiguity involved.

Even though it’s unlikely anyone will think it’s referring to millibits, there’s still a decent chance some will assume Mb (Megabits) due to the lowercase 'b' instead of the intended MB (Megabytes).

game cartridges used to be specced in megabits

I wonder what the transmission rate of information through genetic evolution is.

Kilo base pairs among other things.

Over time, yes, but I suspect the per-second bitrate is extremely small.

Do not forget parallelism. Neural networks, electronic circuits, and a lot of other processes in nature occur simultaneously at an enormous scale.

I wonder how much this will be obscoleted by JPEG XL.

or AVIF.

JPEG XL reference codec includes a slower encoding mode for high density photography compression (iterating with butteraugli guidance like in guetzli). Of course there will always be some room for external optimizers, just I'd expect the gains to be smaller.

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