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By Josh Aas 5 March 2014

Today I?d like to announce a new Mozilla project called ?mozjpeg?. The goal is to provide a production-quality JPEG encoder that improves compression while maintaining compatibility with the vast majority of deployed decoders.

Why are we doing this?

JPEG has been in use since around 1992. It?s the most popular lossy compressed image format on the Web, and has been for a long time. Nearly every photograph on the Web is served up as a JPEG. It?s the only lossy compressed image format which has achieved nearly universal compatibility, not just with Web browsers but all software that can display images.

The number of photos displayed by the average Web site has grown over the years, as has the size of those photos. HTML, JS, and CSS files are relatively small in comparison, which means photos can easily make up the bulk of the network traffic for a page load. Reducing the size of these files is an obvious goal for optimization.
What we?re releasing today, as version 1.0, is a fork of libjpeg-turbo with ?jpgcrush? functionality added.
Our next goal is to improve encoding by making use of trellis quantization.
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Why don't we just start migrating away from JPEG, instead of hacking workarounds to improve a deprecated image standard? PNG is small enough to be usable without lossy compression, and JPEG 2000, or even WebP or JPEG XR offer superior functionality at much the same filesize as JPEG.

 

JPEG (and GIF) should have been retired by now.

 

I applaud Mozilla for their efforts, but it's a half-assed solution to the problem.

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