Why does Arachne convert JPEGs to Bitmaps ?
JPEGs images are very slow to decompress – well, there are some ultrafast JPEG viewers, but usually viewing BMP is much faster than viewing JPEG. Imagine that on PCs, which are not able to handle Virtual Screens, Arachne would have to decompress all JPEGs each time you scroll the page! And even on PCs with Virtual Screens enabled, Arachne would have to decompress JPEGs each time you return to a previous or cached page. If you prefer images in CACHE to be stored as GIFs, rather than BMPs, you can do some changes to your MIME.CFG (you will find some tips how to do it in this file). It will occupy less disk space, but it will be also much slower. The image quality of GIFs may be better for 16 color modes – but you will loose quality if you are using HiColor modes. Maybe in future, Arachne will convert JPEGs “on the fly”, while downloading them – but they will be always converted to some faster image format.
