🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏 #
In South Korea some people think that finger pinch above is a feminist hate symbol which symbolizes the microscopic penis sizes of anti-feminist men. While in this case this site update is not really about penises, it does have something to do with size, as for a website it matters a lot!
the tiny HUGE update! #
The Entropic Domain has been painstakingly updated to be almost completely made up of webp image files. Before the contributors would slap massive files into the project without much thought or consideration for the end user, which led to MASSIVE bloat issues, which only showed that the maintainer of this site, Cheecken, hates all of you. Especially you mobile users.
To understand how terribly bloated the site actually was, here are some great examples to point to. #
Exhibit one, the worst one by the way…
This article now loads fast and that without any of you needing to worry about insane phone bills, or data running out, or your decades old computer catching on fire. To cut it short, this article was 270 MB large. Yeah.
All the images in that article have been transcoded to a lossy WebP format, which led to this absolutely insane reduction in filebloat. These around 9 MB are roughly equivalent to about 3% of the original filesize of the image collection of that article. Just Terrible.
Exhibit two, another headscratcher…
The Chivalry Medieval Warfare article made use of gifs. The things you use to send your friends animated pictures. Gif really is a movie format, just that it is especially terrible, is essentially supported across the board, and isn’t very easy to compress depending on resolution, framerate, colour depth and framerate of your source media. To be honest, it’s a terrible format which should not exist anymore, as it looks cruddy, is too bloated and doesn’t even have much use outside of sending your friends memes over external websites. This one also was over 100 MB big, maybe even 150 MB, and that using compressed gifs! Now those have been replaced using VP9 encoded videos, which all in all are only 3.1 MB in size.
Exhibit three, this one is a little different!
This one saw a huge change on tiny files! The original files already were exceptionally small, however thanks to WebP this article possesses only 65 KB of image data!
So there we go, the site is much much leaner now! We are very sorry we subjected you to these insane file sizes. We were under the presumption that the site was optimal enough due to the quick loading times on desktop, but that notion was very distant from reality.
There are more challenges on the horizon, many images in some articles for instance reach a size of around 100 KB to 150 KB, for which resolutions could get halved to save more space, which matters when an article is populated with more and more images.
When choosing the file format here, there could have been other interesting picks, such as the avif stills format, or JPEGXL, in the end WebP had to be the format of choice as it is more widely supported than the other formats, which at least in my opinion, are actually superior for their microscopic file sizes and excellent lazy loading capabilities respectively.
For more feature suggestions, feedback and complaints, you can always reach the primary maintainer of the site on this email address: [email protected]