Results of PNG compression tools

I've repeated Oleg Kikin's PNG compression tools test with the following competitors:

• Adobe Photoshop CS4
• AdvanceCOMP 1.15
• OptiPNG 0.6.3
• PNGCrush 1.7.6
• PNGOut r20091108

I've made two tests. First, with a sprite image (26 x 2532 pixels) with 70 icons in it (used in real life in one of my previous project) and second, with a set of those 70 icons in separated files.

Finding the perfect image optimizer

To create a great system, I'll first need to do a research about what image optimizers should I use for PNGs, JPEGs and GIFs.

First the PNGs. I've found a chart about PNG compression tools, but I don't know when and with what versions of tools did Oleg Kikin do that. So I'll have to repeat his test with the same images. What I've found quite interesting, that it looks like the best tool is the Windows based PNGOut. I'll not able to use that in my project, since it'll have to work on linux, but there is a hope, because there is a linux port of PNGOut by Jonathon Fowler. I'll include it in my test too beside the Windows version. The other competitir is AdvanceCOMP, what was the second best tool in that chart and it has a linux version.

For JPEGs, I'll try JpegOptim and JpegTran. Do you know others?

So what about the GIFs? Well, I'm pretty sure about I'll not use animated GIFs in any of my projects and for 8bit images I'll create GIFs by default using Photoshop, and my system will look after that if the PNG8 version is smaller or not. So currently I don't need to find a GIF optimizer.

Data:uri and MHTML

Do you think that these will ever replace the static content downloads?

I think, yes! But we will need better tools for deployment. In the next few days I'll make some tests about how the data:uri and mhtml solution will save us bandwidth or how it will increse the loadtime.

Do you use these methods?

Who is your friend?

The front-end relies on the back-end, we know that. But you can help those guys to make improvements: add/remove these headers, make this cacheable, try this httpd for static contents.

Who will do these mods? The back-end developers and the system administrators. These two groups will be your best friends!

Not necesarly who you'll hate all time? The graphic designer, who will push into the layout all his (or her) visions and you'll tear your hair out while creating it, especially in all browsers the management planned to support from IE6, FF2.

Do you know somebody, who can be your friend too?

Prologue

I think to front-end optimizasion as a serious problem since I worked on my first high volume website back in 2006. It was an adult online chat site.

Our goal was to serve the visitors with the lowest number of requests and with only the most required bandwidth. This was the first non-experimental site of mine where I used sprite technology and used compression for CSS and JavaScript files.

At those days after completely finished the site, there was a request for a co-brand generator with all the images, CSS and JavaScript files, so I had to recreate all the bitmap images in SVG to be able to modify the colors in them. It was quite interesting job, but worked and the site works today too.

My plan is to write down my ideas about developement and about a universal deploying solution for static contents.