AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown

Brian Bruns bruns at 2mbit.com
Fri Jan 30 00:49:11 UTC 2004


On Thursday, January 29, 2004 7:14 PM [GMT-5=EST], Kevin Loch
<kloch at gurunet.net> wrote:

> Nicole wrote:
>>  In the past few days our AOL users have been reporting serious problems
>
> Several Brickshelf users have complained about the new "blurry images"
> problem using AOL.  I have not heard any reports of broken images or
> upload problems yet.
>
> Kevin Loch
> I

This is more of their AOL TopSpeed stuff.  Basically, the reason why end users
are seeing the blurry images is because of the AOL ART format being used by
their web proxies.  Downloaded images via the built in web browser are
actually not in the same format as they were on the server.  Basically, AOL's
proxies download the image, recompress it as an ART image (killing a good
portion of the quality in photos especially) and forwards it to the built in
IE browser which knows how to render the ART images (even though the images
themselves are still called .gif and .jpg and similar).

Want to see an example of this?  In older AOL versions (before 7 IIRC), load
up a photo in the built in IE browser in AOL with image compression on, right
click and save the image to disk, then try to open it with third party image
program such as GIMP or PaintShop Pro and watch it moan about the format not
being right.

The sudden decrease in quality could be because they turned up the compression
level.

-- 
Brian Bruns
The Summit Open Source Development Group
Open Solutions For A Closed World / Anti-Spam Resources
http://www.sosdg.org

The AHBL - http://www.ahbl.org




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