Ok, so does everybody really think that Google is doing this to benefit people or themselves?

Caffeine was supposed to speed up the time it took to index pages, and any online publisher I’ve talked to is showing the same thing, Caffeine, while having some very nice features for the end user, for the publisher it’s actually indexing the pages slower.

We have a lot of photos, art work, illustrations and dog cartoons that would benefit from the new program. Speeding the website up without loss of image quality would be an advantage. Go for it, Google!

It looks fine but most of my website pictures are about 10Kb, my biggest picture is about 240Kb and reducing 10% of it will not change anything, moreover I do not think that google people developed something new when you save a picture the software you use compresses it as bmp,jpg,png and so on, now, no matter what google did to those pictures, at the moment you save it as png then the compression is as png compression.

I downloaded their samples and all png’s are BIGGER that the jpg’s, so this is i presume… a joke.

You can save the same 135Kb first saple jpg picture at 20% quality and get it weight only 95Kb and still looks good.

There are some very good pro’s and con’s to this subject.

1. The need for speed is an insatiable desire – however, it does stimulate innovation and in the medical field that is a must as every second counts!

2. It will leave the weary who do not upgrade their browsers behind. As a result anyone running a web store (ours has 150,000+ medical images) will have to lag behind the technology for a few years not to loose customers.

3. However, like Adobe Air and from a users perspective – give me all that you have got! I am a consumer of data and I like it as fast as I can get it.

So, like any new technology there will be early, normal and late adopter growing pains. But, like everything else it will work itself out over time.

I say go for it!!!

I’m currently in the battle between using new CSS3 techniques like border-image that can really make sites look great and are easy to maintain and customize.

IF there were an image format that could compress like JPEG yet have an accurate alpha channel mask like PNG then I’m interested, otherwise I’d say JPEG works well enough for lossy situations. PNG works great but they’re generally too large in file size for larger areas/images.

I say, Google, go for it but get that accurate semi-transparency working first before pushing it on others, otherwise you really don’t have a lot to sell, at least to those of us that craft custom sites.

I commend Google for trying to do something to speed up the web.

As a provider of hosting and working with many different graphic designers; where I am seeing the real size problems on websites, is in the Javascript and new CSS being used.

One of the biggest data consumers out there are sites using Font Replacement supported by Javascript. The site looks great, but only after a 75 – 100k font has downloaded, with a 50+k support file to control it all. Add to that a “general” CSS file which a designer uses on many of their sites (so is 30+k in size); we suddently have a page load of over 150k even before the images are downloaded.

That size is not a big problem if you are connected via ADSL2+ at 12,000mb/s but what about many of the places around the world where they are lucky to see 1,500mb/s on a good day. Up until about 3 years ago, it was normal to try and keep the main entry page load to under 100k. Now I visit bank websites and many other places where the front page load is closer to 300k.

The websites don’t look that much different; so where is the extra 200k of download coming from? From what I can see, it appears to be Javascript. Used for tracking you throughout the website (to provide a more meaningful visit….); and crafting square corners into round corners. With all that extra download, I can put up with square corners.

I hope Google helps bring the focus back onto speed; but not at the expense of creating more turmoil in the graphic world. For all of you using .png files out there; remember IEv6 does not see them at all; and we are still showing an average of 20% of visitors across our servers still using the old workhorse.

My 2 cents worth.

Why can’t search engines and service providers compress all the photos on the Internet on their end? This would be the real and final solution to the problem of large files.

If they can make a truly significant difference, such as 50% smaller, then go for it. Otherwise it just adds complexitiy for no real reason.

Somone new to building a site won’t necessarily know the difference between a jpg, gif, bmp or png – why confuse them further with a “webp”?

To me it sounds like Google will wait until many sites are using it, then suddenly decide you need to pay…

Worse, I can imagine them deliberately ranking sites higher than use it, which is an abuse of their power really.