3 ms·

The bradley_outline.png background image on this page is 617KB in size. About ten times bigger than it needs to be. I wonder how much web bandwidth is wasted by

by by 16y ago

The bradley_outline.png background image on this page is 617KB in size. About ten times bigger than it needs to be. I wonder how much web bandwidth is wasted by poorly optimised images. Maybe there is a business opportunity in an automated tool to detect these ... just musing to myself.

dalore 16y ago
Doesn't Opera's mobile browser do something like that? The requests go through an Opera proxy which optimizes images.
- by 16y ago
  Yes, you are right, they are selling something based on providing a partial solution to a very small piece of the problem, and something like that ought to be able to produce stats.
pbhjpbhj 16y ago
Things like YSlow and PageSpeed give reports on optimising images but are run manually. YSlow gives a link to smush.it (compress the image via smush.it website - http://smushit.zenfs.com/results/50dfa0f4/smush//theme/4bc93976dabe9d503f000008/stylesheets/images/bradley_outline.png http://smushit.zenfs.com/results/50dfa0f4/smush//theme/4bc93...) which saves 60% and retains it as a PNG. Personally I couldn't see the image until it was pointed out - so a huge waste of bandwidth for no design gain in my case.
gigawatt 16y ago
Pingdom lets you test load times for everything on your site: http://tools.pingdom.com/ http://tools.pingdom.com/
sp332 16y ago
Open in Chrome, right-click the page and choose Inspect Element. Click Resources at the top.
- by 16y ago
  Yes, I was thinking about it in broader terms of the total bandwidth consumed on the web by these things. Say, for sake of argument, it's 10% of the total traffic. Now what does that traffic cost, and how much more money could the companies who have inefficient sites make if they were optimised properly and therefore running faster. That figure is probably a lot of money. My thought was there might be some way of tackling that large problem as a whole in some nice automated way and take a cut of the money somehow. A green business idea. Probably silly.

by by 16y ago

dalore 16y ago

Doesn't Opera's mobile browser do something like that? The requests go through an Opera proxy which optimizes images.

by 16y ago
Yes, you are right, they are selling something based on providing a partial solution to a very small piece of the problem, and something like that ought to be able to produce stats.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago

Things like YSlow and PageSpeed give reports on optimising images but are run manually. YSlow gives a link to smush.it (compress the image via smush.it website - http://smushit.zenfs.com/results/50dfa0f4/smush//theme/4bc93976dabe9d503f000008/stylesheets/images/bradley_outline.png http://smushit.zenfs.com/results/50dfa0f4/smush//theme/4bc93...) which saves 60% and retains it as a PNG. Personally I couldn't see the image until it was pointed out - so a huge waste of bandwidth for no design gain in my case.

gigawatt 16y ago

Pingdom lets you test load times for everything on your site: http://tools.pingdom.com/ http://tools.pingdom.com/

sp332 16y ago

Open in Chrome, right-click the page and choose Inspect Element. Click Resources at the top.

by 16y ago
Yes, I was thinking about it in broader terms of the total bandwidth consumed on the web by these things. Say, for sake of argument, it's 10% of the total traffic. Now what does that traffic cost, and how much more money could the companies who have inefficient sites make if they were optimised properly and therefore running faster. That figure is probably a lot of money. My thought was there might be some way of tackling that large problem as a whole in some nice automated way and take a cut of the money somehow. A green business idea. Probably silly.