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matzipan

How often do you need lossless images on the web? Almost never.

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All those animated GIFs around the web, plus the images were JPEG artefacts would be noticed. Examples:

The Y logo in the top left of this page is a GIF.

All the logos at http://www.ycombinator.com/ plus the six images below More Quotes are PNGs.

Forgot PNG is lossless :P

If the compression is good enough, always. Lossy compression was born out of necessity, after all.

It was not born out of necessity. It was born because of the way your brain percieves the images. There is no need in adding detail if your brain can live happily without it.

And if FLIF achieves such great lossless compression, imagine what amazing compression you can achieve with lossy compression.

Let's take a step back. Why did developers start to think about how the brain perceives details and how to trick it in the first place? Out of a necessity to save bandwidth and/or storage space.

You have a point. But I also like fast, snappy websites :P

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