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Comment by Yver | Hacker News Reader

As much as I like WebP, the numbers given in this article are misleading. The original image is indeed 52 kb. If you like optimizing PNGs, you can recompress it (losslessly, obviously) to ~49 kb. Now the same image in WebP is 35 kb, not 11 kb. The only way for WebP to make it a 11 kb image is to compress it in lossy mode.

Granted, even at 11 kb the image looks really good and there are no visible artifacts but when you put the original image and the lossy version side-by-side, you can see that some tones are slightly off and gradients/shades are slightly different.

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Exactly. The 11kb WebP version shows visible degradation: http://f.cl.ly/items/140L0J3d203g410d0m3T/webp-colors.png

The same image can be made into a 13kb PNG (8-bit + imageoptim), without any complex trickery and 99.5% browser support: http://f.cl.ly/items/303H1k2c412s1o0m1b2m/webp-8.png

I too like webp, both for lossy and lossless images (particularly lossless), and you're right, the best I got (lossless) was 34.5kb using:

cwebp -lossless -pass 10 -m 6 MaxCDN-WebP.png -o image.webp

Still that's not a bad compression improvement given that 'pngcrush -brute' failed to improve compression and pngout managed only to bring it down to 50.1kb

Lossy plus alpha isn't cheating, its a legitimate gap in the market. It's also the feature that prompted Mozilla to look at the format again.

We had lossy RGBA many years ago with JNG (a simple PNG/JPG mashup format), but Mozilla killed the format along with MNG. The reason was that the MNG lib added about 100kB to the installer. They suggested to use Flash instead. (Yes, seriously.)

With JNG those massive parallax websites could be ~1MB instead of ~5MB.

A minority browser giving up on a fringe image format is hardly first degree murder. More like giving up on CPR after it clearly wasn't helping.

But lossy + alpha was a good idea then and it still is now.

"Minority browser"? What's that supposed to mean? Anything other than Chrome? Or, if we go back a few years, anything other than IE?

In case you didn't know, there are 3 very important browsers: Chrome, Firefox, and IE. Right now, Firefox got around 20%, IE around 30%, and Chrome around 40%.

There are also a few countries where Firefox is the most popular one. For example, in Germany it currently got around 45%.

>a fringe image format

Was PNG any different? People usually don't randomly start to use some image format if it isn't supported by any browser.

Also, ripping two images out of one file and splicing them together requires very little code. In a high-level language it's maybe 50 lines of code. There are many games which do that. It's very simple and it saves typically around 80%.

I don't know why the GP said "minority browser", but to be fair to them, it appears that Mozilla removed MNG and JNG in 2003[1], when that certainly was a fair description of the Mozilla Suite and Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox marketshare.

Interesting to see Hixie in there advocating for MNG (or, rather, for a format with 8-bit alpha and animation that's not Flash).

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280

http://css-ig.net/articles/test-webp-021

That's the old 0.21 version being tested, 0.30 was just released.

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