m5 vs -19 is nearly 2.5x faster to decompress; given that most data is decompressed many many more times (often thousands or millions of times more, often by devices running on small batteries) than it is compressed, that's an enormous win, not "only slightly faster".
The way in which it might not be worth it is the larger size, which is a real drawback.
The difference is barely noticeable in real-world cases, in terms of performance or battery. Decoding images is a small part of loading an entire webpage from the internet. And transferring data isn't free either, so any benefits need to be offset against the larger file size and increased network usage.
When you talk about images over HTTP, you need to consider most web servers and browsers already support zstd compression on the transport, so the potential bandwidth win provided by zstd is already being made use of today.
So someone is going to load 2.5x as many images because it can be decoded 2.5x faster? The paradox isn't a law of physics, it's an interesting observation about markets. (If this was a joke it was too subtle for me)
Might as well just shoot yourself if that's how you look at improvements. The only way to do something good it to stop existing. (this is a general statement, not aimed at you or anyone in particular)
The numbers seem small enough that it will rarely matter, but I suppose there might be a use case somewhere?
But lets be real here: this is basically just a new image format. With more code to maintain, fresh new exciting zero-days, and all of that. You need a strong use case to justify that, and "already fast encode is now faster" is probably not it.
I don’t think it’s quite as bad, though? It’s using a known compression library that (from reading other comments) has seen use and testing. The rest of PNG would remain unchanged, as the decompression format is a plugin.
I know it needs to be battle tested as a single entity but it’s not the same as writing a new image format from scratch.
