In 2023, images on the web make up 41% of transmitted data, significantly impacting the performance of web apps. Fortunately, image formats like WEBP and AVIF could offer advanced compression and faster page loading, but may face performance disparities across browsers. Therefore, we conducted performance evaluations on five major browsers - Chrome, Edge, Safari, Opera, and Firefox - while comparing four image formats. The results indicate that the newer formats exhibited notable performance enhancements across all browsers, leading to shorter loading times. Compared to the compressed JPEG format, WEBP and AVIF improved the Page Load Time by 21% and 15%, respectively. However, web scraping revealed that JPEG and PNG still dominate web image choices, with WEBP at 4% as the most used new format. Through the web scraping and web performance evaluation, this research serves to (1) explore image format preferences in web applications and analyze distribution and characteristics across frequently-visited sites in 2023 and (2) assess the performance impact of distinct web image formats on application load times across popular web browsers.

翻译：2023年，图像占网页传输数据的41%，对Web应用性能产生显著影响。尽管WEBP和AVIF等图像格式能提供更先进的压缩技术和更快的页面加载速度，但不同浏览器间可能存在性能差异。为此，我们对Chrome、Edge、Safari、Opera和Firefox五大主流浏览器进行了性能评估，比较了四种图像格式。结果表明，新型格式在所有浏览器上均展现出显著的性能提升，加载时间明显缩短。与压缩JPEG格式相比，WEBP和AVIF分别使页面加载时间缩短21%和15%。然而，网络爬取数据显示JPEG和PNG仍主导网页图像选择，使用率最高的新型格式WEBP仅占4%。通过网页爬取与性能评估，本研究旨在：(1)探究Web应用中图像格式的偏好，分析2023年高频访问网站的分布与特征；(2)评估不同Web图像格式对主流浏览器应用加载时间的影响。