Mozilla Doubles Down on JPEG Encoding with mozjpeg 2.0

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today announced the release of mozjpeg version 2.0. The JPEG encoder is now capable of reducing the size of both baseline and progressive JPEGs by 5 percent on average (compared to those produced by the standard JPEG library libjpeg-turbo upon which mozjpeg is based). Mozilla today also revealed that Facebook is testing mozjpeg 2.0 to see whether it can be used to improve the compression of images on Facebook.com. The company has even donated $60,000 to contribute to the ongoing development of the technology.

Tiny bumps in JPEG performance

[chrylis]

and still no merge of the working WebP patch that was proposed four years ago [mozilla.org] because NIH.

Re:Hard to get excited.

[Anonymous Coward]

5% of image bandwidth saved for someone like Facebook is millions of dollars in operating expense. Get a clue.

Re:Hard to get excited.

[tysonedwards]

And when Facebook is saying that only 1.48% of their bandwidth is going towards images. That puts said reduction 5% reduction at a new percent of 1.41% at the expense of increased CPU time to transcode all existing images, which is itself not free. It is a marginal savings, even for an organization the size of Facebook. It certainly adds up over time, which is great, but when there is really great low hanging fruit like cutting the 37% of their bandwidth used on videos by 20-30% by getting HEVC or VP9 really working well (would then be 26% total), then that is a way to save significant money not just in Bandwidth but in Disk Space for retention as well.

Re:Hard to get excited.

[omnichad]

...low hanging fruit like cutting the 37% of their bandwidth used on videos by 20-30% by getting HEVC or VP9 really working well

If they wanted to tackle the low-hanging fruit, why not stop auto-playing video at all?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Hard to get excited.

[Thud457]

They just ripped this off from Pied Piper. Probably can't even handle 3D video properly.

aw crap, I have shamed myself.

Re:Tiny bumps in JPEG performance

[rrp]

One problem with your logic is that WebP isn't just a replacement for jpeg. Sure it can be used that way, but WebP also supports alpha channels and animations. And yes, you can argue that we can just use a HTML5 video for that (except I've only heard of Chrome supporting transparent videos at the moment...), but it's much more complicated than creating a WebP with those features, and it can be shown on a website with a simple img tag, IMHO. And being able to take for example a 10 MB animated gif and shrink it down to around a 1 MB animated WebP seems like a worthy enough cause to me.