The Bort thread 🔦

PNG is probably the most appropriate popular format for screenshots. It’s lossless, widely supported, and has reasonable compression.

I’m hoping QOI will get wider support soon though… it gets compression ratios similar to PNG, but it’s dramatically simpler and faster. Like, fast enough to save lossless video in real time, and simple enough that even a cheap old low-end embedded CPU can encode/decode it without breaking a sweat.

So perhaps my 4770K will live again!

I actually like this computer still, and it lasted almost 11 years, unheard of for me.

BTW what browser/computer does @ToyKeeper use?

PNG files are way easier to use than webp files, and they save much more quickly than the way I save webp files (10 passes at the slowest speed.)
I like webp files because they’re more efficient.
I usually save webp files at 90 (or 95) quality, which is not lossless of course, but it looks extremely good.
A lot of image hosts (and computer programs) don’t support webp files, though.
For most people, PNG files are the way to go for screenshots.

So why use webp?
You can obviously afford the slight extra storage space PNG uses.

Because webp images are much more efficient than PNG images, and they load more quickly for those with slow internet.

These days slow internet is many Mbps, the difference is small.

I just took a screenshot of this thread.
The PNG image is 684KB.
The webp image is 317KB – it looks very good, but not perfect like the PNG.
Every little bit adds up, and I just appreciate efficiency.

Its not worth the trouble, as i mentioned i can crop, screenshot and post an image all in under 5 seconds.
That is much more time efficient

It’s not worth it for you, but it’s worth it for me.
The way that I take screenshots, posting a PNG image is only about one second faster than posting a webp image.

Thats why you should switch to the dark side.
I mean Firefox

I think that I use a lot of extensions in Chrome (and Chrome Beta) that aren’t available in Firefox.
Also, even though I use Firefox a little, I much prefer Chrome.

I find basic features are missing in Chrome, I have it but Firefox is fully featured and not stripped down.

If we keep this up, we’ll run out of “thanks” again.

It wouldn’t have any trouble with QOI. The cheap chips I had in mind are much less capable than that… like the embedded MCU running the firmware in my keyboard. Even something like that can encode and decode QOI pretty quickly, and the main limitation there isn’t MCU speed, but rather, RAM and I/O for holding and displaying the data.

It’s just a really, really simple image format… and if it had existed 30 years ago, we’d probably be using it instead of GIF and PNG.

Pretty cheap old computers. Like at the moment I’m typing on an 8-year-old Intel NUC which was built to be small and low-cost / low-power.

… and my favorite browser is called Dillo, a “Web 1.0” browser I discovered from early embedded Linux devices. It can even run on an Atari if that gives you any idea how resource-friendly it is. It does HTML, still images, and some CSS… but no javascript or video or anything like that. It uses less RAM than lynx (the text-mode browser), while still being graphical. It’s a quick, lightweight way to read the web… and due to its limited feature set, it’s pretty much immune to malware.

Here’s a screenshot of it showing BLF:

… and browsing slashdot on an old Linux PDA with a 0.206 GHz CPU and 0.064 GiB of RAM. It was very quick and efficient even on that old hardware, barely sipping the battery, and leaving plenty of room for other programs to run at the same time.

… and it has kept that efficiency for decades. At the moment, this computer has 138 tabs open in Dillo, split between a couple dozen windows, occupying a total of 826.3 MiB of RAM. That works out to about 6 MiB per tab. When I press a hotkey to open a new instance (whole new independent process, not just another window), it appears in roughly the same amount of time it takes to lift my finger from the key.

However, it can’t do “Web 2.0” stuff like playing games or running applications. It’s pretty much only for reading pages and viewing images.

Looks like QOI is much better than PNG (for lossless images.)
Will it ever be supported by web browsers?

Interesting. I stopped keeping up on this stuff long ago, never should have done that.

That takes me back.
If you lived nearby i would offer you this computer if you were interested.

Interesting keyboard layout, i am not familiar with it.
Can it manage modern websites like say Home Depot or Slate/Vox or a message forum that runs on phpBB?
Or modern Reddit

By the way, webp images can be lossless as well.
The lossless webp image (referenced in the quoted post above) is 359KB–not bad for lossless!

And even though I like webp images right now, there are better formats that exist–they just aren’t supported by web browsers (or most other programs) yet.

It’s not strictly better… mostly just simpler and faster. But if you want an 8-bit VGA image or if you want HDR (10+ bits per channel) or if you want any of the other less-used features PNG supports, you’d still need PNG. QOI only supports 24-bit (RGB) and 32-bit (RGBA) pictures, and only a single compression method. It was primarily designed to maximize speed and minimize the amount of code required, while attempting to get near the same size files as PNG.

PNG, meanwhile, supports all kinds of odd stuff and can choose from a wide set of compression algorithms on a per-row basis. That’s most of why it takes so long to save PNG images, and why tools like optipng exist to do it even more slowly. It has to compress the data several times and pick the algorithm which produced the smallest result.

Personally, after I take screenshots or otherwise use PNG, I tend to run optipng *.png as the final step in order to compress them as much as possible… but this is a “run it then find something else to do for a little while” sort of command. And I really like the idea of being able to save pics in just a few milliseconds instead of having to wait long enough for my mind to wander.

I hope so.

But it’s still pretty new, and look at how long it’s taking to get webp supported everywhere. These things take a while.