> Here I should note that Python is not the best choice for CPU-bound software. I want to take the opportunity to learn Zig.

For optimizing CPU-bound operations in Python, there’s some low hanging fruit with numba. I would recommend this as a 5-minute solution to you limiting your algorithm because regular Python is too slow. I regularly tell people that if their Python program is slow enough to take several minutes, you could probably learn numba before it finishes.

Love the goal of supporting ancient browsers. What I’m missing in the article about images is images. For example the achieved results and some table of the amount of space saved using the compression methods described. Nonetheless interesting read.

Cool effort! I appreciated the background into the why, as initially I thought this would have to do with optimizing animated GIFs and didn't realize there was a usecase for single frame GIFs anymore.