Change Details

If Google's WebP format increases in popularity (eg with rumored default support in future versions of Chrome), it could be advantageous to support generating thumbnails in WebP as an alternative to JPEG; WebP images can generally fit the same quality into a smaller filesize, which cuts down on bandwidth usage and download times. In the ideal case, WebP images should be shipped out on-demand to any browser that declares support for them. The biggest difficulty would be in getting content-type negotiation working for image fetches for anonymous page views! Ah, caching. ;) But even as an option that triggers only for logged-in users, it's something to think about. -------------------------- **Version**: unspecified **Severity**: enhancement **URL**: http://caniuse.com/#feat=webp

With Chrome representing 47% of our traffic nowadays, it's clearly desirable to serve WebP thumbnails to browsers capable of rendering them, given that at equal visual quality they would be smaller than their JPG (and possibly PNG for lossless WebP) counterparts. Our infrastructure is currently designed to render thumbnails on demand, which is a weakness in a situation like this when introducing a new thumbnail variant. Particularly when rendering thumbnails in WebP is significantly more time-consuming than our current method of generating JPGs. Past a certain point, the time it takes to generate thumbnails on the fly becomes a nuisance to clients. Also storage cost is non-negligible and we probably don't have the capacity to have our thumbnails storage size nearly double "overnight". Therefore it's unlikely that in an initial stage we would be able to generate WebP variants for all thumbnails. Given these constraints, the current ideal plan could be the following, assuming a WebP-capable client: - If the thumbnail doesn't receive much traffic, serve its JPG version - If the thumbnail surpasses a certain edge traffic threshold, check if a WebP version is available - If no WebP version is available yet, serve the JPG version to the client, and schedule the WebP version to be generated asynchronously - If a WebP version is available thanks to a prior request, serve it This introduces novel mechanics in our thumbnailing infrastructure: - Fallback support - Fire-and-forget request to generate a thumbnail variant - Inspecting edge traffic information (ideally at the edge itself) -------------------------- **Version**: unspecified **Severity**: enhancement **URL**: http://caniuse.com/#feat=webp

If Google's WebP format increases in popularity (eg with rumored default support in future versions of Chrome), it could be advantageous to support generating thumbnails in WebP as an alternative to JPEG;With Chrome representing 47% of our traffic nowadays, WebP images can generally fit the same quality into a smaller filesizeit's clearly desirable to serve WebP thumbnails to browsers capable of rendering them, which cuts down on bandwidth usage and download timesgiven that at equal visual quality they would be smaller than their JPG (and possibly PNG for lossless WebP) counterparts. In the ideal caseOur infrastructure is currently designed to render thumbnails on demand, which is a weakness in a situation like this when introducing a new thumbnail variant. Particularly when rendering thumbnails in WebP is significantly more time-consuming than our current method of generating JPGs. Past a certain point, WebP images should be shipped out on-demand to any browser that declares support for themthe time it takes to generate thumbnails on the fly becomes a nuisance to clients. The biggest difficulty would be in getting content-type negotiation working for image fetches for anonymous page views! Also storage cost is non-negligible and we probably don't have the capacity to have our thumbnails storage size nearly double "overnight". Therefore it's unlikely that in an initial stage we would be able to generate WebP variants for all thumbnails. Given these constraints, the current ideal plan could be the following, assuming a WebP-capable client: - If the thumbnail doesn't receive much traffic, serve its JPG version - If the thumbnail surpasses a certain edge traffic threshold, check if a WebP version is available - If no WebP version is available yet, serve the JPG version to the client, and schedule the WebP version to be generated asynchronously - If a WebP version is available thanks to a prior request, Ah,serve it This introduces novel mechanics in our thumbnailing infrastructure: caching.- Fallback support ;) But even as an option that triggers only for logged-in users,- Fire-and-forget request to generate a thumbnail variant it's something to think about.- Inspecting edge traffic information (ideally at the edge itself) -------------------------- **Version**: unspecified **Severity**: enhancement **URL**: http://caniuse.com/#feat=webp