[webkit-dev] WebKit runtime image compression

[Kalle Vahlman]

2008/12/15 Paul Pedriana <ppedriana at gmail.com>:
> Thanks. I didn't mean to suggest something like this should be part of
> WebKit. I was wondering if anybody had any experience they could share that
> might help me or others come to faster conclusions about the usefulness or
> feasibility of this in custom ports. If I implement the formats below I can
> report back on my results and possibly donate to ports that might be
> interested in this, such as OWB.

Well, for CE device oriented applications the feasibility of the
compression really comes down to the balance between memory
consumption and CPU speed. If you compress, you will (potentially)
spend lots of time decompressing the images but can view bigger pages.
If you don't, it will be faster but limit the amount of in-memory
images.

That said, Federico Mena Quintero did some research about this few years ago:

  http://www.gnome.org/~federico/news-2005-11.html#moz-images

I'm not sure if that idea has realized itself in any project though.
At least lazy decompression of images based on visibility on the
screen sounds like a great idea (eg. when you read only 25% of a very
long page with images, like planets), I wonder if anyone is doing that
already in browser engines?

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh at iki.fi
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