This is something that I truly hate about WebP, thankfully AVIF exists and it's supported by all major browsers.
P.S. hope not messed up with links
Anyway, my game consisted of a slide of images and we vote what's the most appropriate format. When when people got a hang of it, I threw in WebP and SVG. I talk about those last, because they can easily abused: i.e an SVG with an embedded png.
The SVG was 20MB. The PNG version at huge resolution was 20kB.
PNG is really good when you have a few flat colors. SVG is really bad when you have lots of fine detail.
Well maybe not huge huge. Like 1000px wide so they look nice on retina screens.
The key is that these images were just 2 contiguous color areas. Black and transparent. PNG is really good for that because the compression algorithm works on the basis of contiguous color areas.
What I mean is, if you have a million pixels of the same color (0xDEADBEEF maybe), then PNG will call that 1,000,000 x OxDEADBEEF. So, it scales very nicely for few-color, sparse or "blocky" images.
It’s incompetence to blame rather than file-size, maybe designers or someone in the briefing process that is uninformed that confuses the requirements for everyone else.
Also… I don’t trust Figmas quality with exported SVG. Just type some text, export it and see how it degrades…
Couldn’t find the source of the issue so could only assume the SVG data was being compressed on export.
We decided to only use it to share graphic across the team, in any instance we were working with type we used illustrator.
You can also use lossless WebP in place of PNG these days.
To implement this you can get nginx to generate the webp from the JPG or PNG. Then you get that cached by your CDN.
If you need to change your compression levels then you can delete the cache on the CDN.
You can use the varies header to see if webp is accepted. If not, serve the original. In this way people can save the hires JPG with a right click.
You can also amp up the compression just for when the data saving flag is set.
The best thing is that you can do all this with hardly any lines of code and the VIPS library to optimise it.
And they’re correct.
PNGs use lossless compression.
JPEGs use lossy compression. (JPEG XL allows for lossless.)
It's not just size but also decompression time. JPEG is way faster to decode which is also on the critical path towards time-to-display
Can you tell me which university class you took that did?
JPEG, PNG, WebP, JPEG XL and SVG. Even though I am pretty sure JPEG XL will win 95% of times.
Now I need to see the 2025 version!
cjbarber•18h ago
F1 is largely about speed. (I fondly remember going to various races as a child with my grandparents, in Melbourne. Everyone seemed in awe of Schumacher). So of course your website should be about speed!
This could then apply to everything: ticket turnstiles that measure themselves on time per guest scanned, food vendors that do the same thing, websites that measure and rank on speed.
atonse•18h ago
But as a counterpoint for the sake of argument, money and time spent on optimizing the website could be better spent on the actual race related stuff. So that might be where the optimization is happening.
In reality, it’s probably the simpler explanation, that they know how to hire mechanical engineering talent and just see IT as a cost center (and a nuisance) so probably are cheap in that department.
consp•18h ago
gpderetta•17h ago
FirmwareBurner•18h ago
Not since a long time. It's about creating endless regulations to please big teams, sponsors and advertisers. 2026 cars will be even slower than before.
dralley•18h ago
Turbos were banned in the 80s because they made the cars too powerful and difficult to handle. The reason F1 tires had big grooves cut into them for a long time was to reduce grip, also in an effort to tame the cars a bit and slow them down while cornering.
The 2026 regulations are no different. Yes peak power is reduced but so is downforce / drag. Drivers will have to brake a bit more at the turns and accelerate out of them (which the extra electrical power will make easier). That means more overtaking possibilities, and the overtaking will likely be more based on driving skill than the current DRS push-to-pass. The current ground effect cars have so much downforce that they can go through corners flat out that no previous generation of cars would have been able to - and while that's cool to watch it's not that interesting from a racing perspective. You don't want to watch a high-speed parade.
For years everyone was catastrophizing about how the 2026 regs would make the cars 8 seconds slower, but the current consensus is around 1 second. That's not a big deal. And it only takes things back to say 2007 speeds, nobody ever accused 2007 of not being exciting.
stockresearcher•15h ago
It was highly entertaining because it did not go well at all, and I'm pretty sure that F1 didn't actually finish the full scheduled tour. But it really showed a big difference between old cars and new.
dralley•15h ago
nullify88•14h ago
dralley•14h ago
cybrjoe•18h ago
We ended up kicking around the track for a few hours taking in all the sights and experiences and he enjoyed that a lot more.
I guess my comment is, speed is important, sure, but don't give me a plaintext website either. There's a balance between speed and entertainment value.
epolanski•18h ago
Depends when you're sitting, but you mostly appreciate it at good corners.
There, you can really feel why F1 is fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1ckq7T1Tlg
cjbarber•18h ago
_thisdot•17h ago
Link to YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pEqyr_uT-k
dylan604•17h ago
prmoustache•14h ago
Having attended f1, rally and euro hillclimb races in person, I also thought the F1 in the v8/v10/v12 era indeed looked slower than on TV. I think the reason is they were so scandalously loud that you would expect something visually faster from something that is ripping your ears off even with plugs.
dylan604•17h ago
That was the exact opposite of my experience with autoracing. Watching on TV with the long tracking/panning shots seem to reduce the effectiveness of the speed. Standing at the track watching the cars fly by and are only there for a split second really brings home how fast they are. "zoom zoom" is about as close as one can get to describing it. There's also just no way to replicate how loud the cars are either. I've seen Fox try where they have moments where the commentators shut the hell up for a minute, they push the mix from the mics around the track, display Vu like meters on screen with some sort of Dolby/surround type of something suggesting it sounds great in that mode. Don't care. Nothing like being there.
rconti•16h ago
On the other hand, my last F1 race was at Silverstone, and we were at Vale grandstand which is right at pit entry and the final chicane before the front straight. Sitting in a braking zone definitely makes the cars look slow.
poemxo•11h ago