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Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

How did this get so many upvotes?

* Doesn't actually explain why speed matters (hint: over 3 seconds people perceive a slow experience and over 10 seconds people will assume the site is broken)

* Doesn't say how to fix speed issues other than one specific small image/tiling "fix"

* If you worked at a real company this would never fly. The solution isn't to change the background altogether and go with tiling vs a big image.

I actually wrote an article on how to improve performance for everyone [1], and it's the biggest bang for your buck that anyone can do (designers, developers, or product folks).

[1] https://userinterfacing.com/the-fastest-way-to-increase-your...

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It's pretty good. The problem with automatic lossy compression is consistent quality.

There is a number of issues with each and every tool you mentioned, e.g. color information stripped with metadata causing color shifts in wide-gamut and non-sRGB images, camera images changing orientation when Exif stripped, color banding on PNGs and JPEGs even when using Guetzli (JPEGmini is not nearly as good in other cases, but Guetzli is extremely slow), unexpected dithering noise on flat PNGs, tracing artefacts on screen recorded GIFs, JPEGs being overcompressed, poor lossless compression (virtually any online service), progressive JPEGs incompatible with Photoshop, etc.

These are just some of the problems I've been solving, and yes, there are better tools.

How are you getting around those issues? Very interesting! I only saw issues w stripping metadata on JPEGs (same issues you saw).

The only solution I found is to build a new tool, and that required a complete rewrite of existing optimizers and significant changes to underlying libraries.

But can't you choose the compression algorithm in those tools? I know you can in ImageOptim and JpegMini...

It's not automatic then, which is critical for batch processing, and does not solve all the problems, and create new usability problems for most users.

I don't understand either how this article got so many upvotes.

Your article is good. But it's still incomplete, simple tasks like using a CDN / Reduce the number of HTTP calls / Caching can be implemented in an afternoon for lots of simple website, et can dramatically improve load times.

Agreed, it wasn't meant to be a comprehensive guide to speed, just tackling the quickest one. You can run these compressors in a matter of minutes whereas CDNs can take a few hours to implement, and generally can't be run by everyone (whereas ImageOptim can be run by basically anyone).

Perhaps some day I'll create a mega checklist of all things to consider to speed up a site :)

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