undefined | Better HN

0 pointsobjclxt14y ago0 comments

The majority of carriers already compress data on-the-fly, to the point where it wouldn't be unknown for application developers to resort to tricks such as base-64 encoding and zipping images up to avoid automatic compression.

There are pros and cons to this approach: some people (me!) appreciate the compression carriers provide, because it saves my bandwidth allowance. But if you had unlimited bandwidth and a fast 3G connection, perhaps you would feel differently.

0 comments

1 comments · 1 top-level

nknight14y ago

I have no problem in general with the lossless compression of text or the transparent re-compression of images on websites, especially since most people are utterly clueless about how much bandwidth they waste on poorly-packed PNGs, obscenely-high-"quality" JPEGs, and even posting bizarrely high-resolution images and depending on img tag parameters to display it reasonably.

Opera Mini is far more invasive, however. What actually gets transmitted to your device is not even HTML, and the JavaScript support is severely limited. It's not just "compression" in the sense we usually understand it, it significantly alters the nature of the data being transmitted.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse