The Web is a fantastic place to access new information and learn about most aspects of human knowledge. Through it, we seek to teach, inform, and entertain ourselves alongside others. A huge part of the modern Web experience includes downloading dozens of high-quality, high-resolution images; lossy and lossless, transparent and opaque, in many different sizes. A single webpage might include at least 2 or 3 high resolution images, and accessing this content quickly enriches and fascinates us. There is a measurable disparity in the global internet experience, however, which is now known as "The Digital Divide".
In the developed world, the vast majority of people living in urban areas have access to fixed terrestrial broadband internet connections of at least 25(down)/3(up)Mbps. This proportion drops significantly compared to rural areas and falls even further when considering the developing world.
Since the internet was invented, and especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital divide has generally decreased across the developed world, but the change has taken decades and still isn't enough. Worse yet, in the developing continent of Africa, average broadband download speeds per-country can be less than 15Mbps. Imagine trying to see a celebrity's Instagram page with speeds like that!
Chosen Few Software believes that a big part of the solution to the digital divide is in the process of being addressed by current organizational and institutional efforts, which aim to raise the bandwidth line itself. However, the other piece of the puzzle is sorely missing; reducing download sizes themselves.
Surge for the Web can be seen operating in its full capacity on every webpage on the Chosen Few Software website. You may (or may not!) have noticed that the backgrounds start as pixelated images, and slowly load in with more detail as you continue reading.
This is Surge for the Web in action! Factually speaking, the majority of an image file's data consists of its finest, smallest details, such as corners, noise, and grain. Surge for the Web takes advantage of this fact and encodes images in a perceptually lossless, multi-resolution format. This then allows your browser, with the help of the Surge JavaScript plugin, to make more efficient usage of your time and bandwidth by loading coarse details NOW, and finer details later.
Because of the advanced, progressive display technology built into Surge formatted images, not only do users save time and bandwidth, but so do we! The graphs in the media carousel below don't lie; Surge for the Web provides equivalent picture quality to the lossless PNG format for a fraction of the bandwidth, and therefore cost.
When your website integrates with Surge, everybody benefits, especially your users who are living in poverty, or other low-bandwidth circumstances such as in rural areas. Surge for the Web allows for a dynamic, scalable content experience on media-rich websites, empowering users to decide how they browse. Stop imagining a world where access equals privilege; start using Surge for the Web!
Surge for the Web is completely standardized as an officially published Internet-Draft. Furthermore, a fully functional and Web-portable reference decoder is available on GitHub. Essentially every browser and platform are supported, with more features planned and well on their way. Additionally, CFS promises to NEVER patent the proprietary algorithms and technology we're using to build our first-party encoder for the SSRG format, leaving the market open to competition and most importantly, innovation.
We are currently looking for potential early adopters and future customers of the Surge project, especially for participating in a 100% free beta testing group for the technology.
If you or an organization you work for are interested in using Surge for the Web, check out our brand-new product, Hurricane Image Encoder.