How can I change the color quality

Hi.

I want to make a browser for my computer thats still on dial up. I want the program to load images in only 256 colors so that the pages will load faster. I know how to make a browser in VB but I don't know how to mess with the image quality. Does anyone know how I can accomplish this?

I might be wrong, but I don't think you can speed up the loading of images like this. The full-colour image would have to be streamed in from the server before any colour reduction could take place.

But I remember that the AOL browser use to compress images. I wonder how that was done.

I imagine that they were running some kind of proxy that "compressed" the images server side, then when you requested a page it would serve up the lower-bits per pixel images from their server. Again, I am not an expert in this area, I just can't imagine a way that you could modify an image before you downloaded it (there would likely have to be something in the http spec that allowed you to specify images at a specific bpp).

Some web servers support page compression (GZip) and will do so if your browser settings allow it. Essentially, if allowed to do so, the web server compresses the page, and sends the compressed page to the browser. At the browser, it recognizes that the page is compressed by the data header, and decompresses it before presentation.

ref http://my.safaribooksonline.com/0130092290/ch05lev1sec4