cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2207898

Did you ever hear the tragedy of WebP The Efficient? I thought not. It’s not a story the GIF gang would tell you. It’s an image legend.

WebP was a new format of pictures, so efficient and so lightweight, it could use modern compression to influence the web pages to actually load faster…

It had such a knowledge of the user’s needs that it could even keep transparency and animations from dying.

The power of modern computing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

It became so widespread… The only thing we had to be afraid of, was people insisting on using formats from the 90’s, which eventually, of course, they did.

Unfortunately, we didn’t teach the noobs everything we knew about compression, then the noobs killed the format by converting it to PNG and sharing that.

Ironic. We could save the web from being too slow, but not from the users.

  • Lexica@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    931·
    11 months ago

    The only problem I have with .webp and .webm is that not that many applications support them and need to be converted first.

    • Droggl@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      371·
      11 months ago

      This. Many viewers still dont support it for some reason so despite all technical glory, effectively its often mostly a nuisance. Cmp ogg/vorbis and possibly countless other examples. Adoption is everything for web formats.

    • Kichae@kbin.social
      261·
      11 months ago

      No, there’s also the problem that they’re Google developed formats. I think an increasing number of us want to be done with Google as much as possible, and there are good alternatives that aren’t getting the support they need right now to give us that freedom.

      • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
        11·
        11 months ago

        I hate Google too, but if they are proper open specification formats and aren’t encumbered by patents, why does it matter that Google created them? Open format is open format regardless of its creator.

        Do these formats have some DRM capability or other nefarious reason to avoid them or is it just because they were created by someone we don’t like?

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
        143·
        11 months ago

        I understand that but we really fucking need to be moving from jpegif. MP3 and MPEG2 were commercial formats too (actually so was jpeg iirc?) and look where they got us. We just really need someone to get the ball rolling to start using newer formats.

        • Gianni R@lemmy.ml
          2·
          11 months ago

          JPEG has always been royalty-free. It just supported arithmetic coding, which at the time was patented. Arithmetic coded JPEGs are exceedingly rare & you’re unlikely to run into any on the Web.

    • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      106·
      11 months ago

      Why are so many people using image viewers from 1993? Nothing against nostalgia, but…

  • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.mlEnglish
    253·
    11 months ago

    Webp is just one more instace of Google trying to own the modern web.

    Give me JPEG XL or give me death, motherfuckers.

    • kate@lemmy.uhhoh.comEnglish
      4·
      11 months ago

      I prefer AVIF, it has significantly better browser support, and since AV1 is getting all the hardware support avif will benefit from this too.

      • beta_tester@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Google dropped jxl support this year. That’s why it has better browser support … Avif is slower to show than jxl in my experience.

        Avif seems to be the future right now

      • Gerula@lemmy.world
        63·
        11 months ago

        Actually everything started like that with big companies that don’t do evil … open source … until it wasn’t anyone …

        • zea@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          21·
          11 months ago

          What are they gonna do, add proprietary extensions? Nobody will support those. It’s open, and it only works by being open. It’s actually in Google’s interests for it to be open, widespread, and an effective format because it saves them bandwidth and improves UX on their actual proprietary stuff like YouTube.

      • Gerula@lemmy.world
        42·
        11 months ago

        Actually everything started lime that with a big company open source … until it wasn’t anyone …

  • Antares@lemm.eeEnglish
    9·
    11 months ago

    Anakin Skywalker : I’ve just learned a terrible truth. I think this Chancellor Palpatine meme is a jpeg.

    Mace Windu : [suprised] A jpeg?

    Anakin Skywalker : Yes, the one we’ve been looking for.

    Mace Windu : How do you know this?

    Anakin Skywalker : I saved the file and it’s a jpeg, not a webp.

    Mace Windu : Are you sure?

    Anakin Skywalker : Absolutely.

  • bouh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    11 months ago

    Jpeg is not what makes the Web slow. The dozens of requests to Google and all the add services and then the add videos.

    When an addblocker makes the page loads so much faster, webp is definitely not what will save Internet.

    • SmoothSurfer@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      11 months ago

      Politely disagreeing, of course the requests made to google services and other statics services make the website slower but when you compare it with uncompressed image formats its almost as nothing. Of course those requests are unnecessary but you just cant compare them with images on slowing down the web.

  • Gianni R@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    11 months ago

    If you look into it a bit more, the resistance around WebP is mainly because it has some crippling weaknesses. I did some visual quality testing ( here, here & here ) & I (as well as many others independently) have found that for photographic images, WebP & JPEG are equals, & Google’s messaging that lossy WebP meaningfully improves upon JPEG for general visual quality per bit is misleading. That being said, WebP has some important strengths that are not often acknowledged. In addition to transparency & (really good) animation support, it also has:

    • a lossless mode that often outperforms PNG
    • great nonphotographic compression (though AVIF outperforms it here)
    • decent compression of photographic sources at lower fidelity, where it actually starts to beat JPEG by a good amount
    • Totally royalty free

    WebP’s main weaknesses are:

    • not better than JPEG for photographic images at useful fidelity
    • Confusing messaging from Google, may have led to slow adoption
    • Based on a video codec, so no progressive decode (even JPEG has this)
    • limited to 8 BPC (lossy & lossless)
    • superseded by JPEG-XL & AVIF, which are both pretty much better at everything

    JPEG-XL in particular is very promising. It faces hostility from Google but has an incredible breadth of features & strong compression performance, as well as Apple ecosystem-wide adoption on the way with the upcoming versions of macOS, iOS, ipadOS, etc. It is also royalty free. AVIF is better than WebP at everything except lossless, too.

    Feeling any which way about WebP, it is still a shame to see it transcoded to PNG. All that wasted potential …

  • Klaymore@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    11 months ago

    The only thing I don’t like about webp is it can either be lossy or lossless, with png and jpg you know if it’s lossless or not.

    • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      Unfortunately there are lots of jpegs resaved or screenshotted to png out there, so that doesn’t help if you don’t know the history of the file.

      Heck, there are even lots such pngs with their extension changed to jpg, which you might not notice unless you check for details or your image viewer differentiates between various formats.

      This whole thing has been a mystery for me for months and I couldn’t I figure out where do such botched files come from, until I realised it’s probably because people can’t handle webps and so are making a mess of things.

  • macniel@feddit.deEnglish
    1512·
    11 months ago

    Webp… For web pictures. Then why are there webp files on my non web harddrives? Give me PNG, SVG, JPEG and GIFs. Not this ugly Google shit. I never liked it in the first place. And take your shitty webm with you.

      • macniel@feddit.deEnglish
        47·
        11 months ago

        Who needs smaller files? We have compressed data streams since ever. Also we use “archaic” formats because the web is built on backwards compatibility.

        Also higher quality? You can’t get higher than lossless (PNG, TIFF) anyway. And JPEGs are good enough for photos. Also you know what kind of picture you have by it’s minetype or file extension. With webp? Well it’s a box of chocolate.

        • QuaternionsRock@lemmy.worldEnglish
          81·
          11 months ago

          While I agree that unique file extensions for each image category are very convenient, this is overall an absurd take.

          You can’t get higher than lossless (PNG, TIFF) anyway

          PNGs have horrendous compression. Like, it’s notorious for that.

          And JPEGs are good enough for photos.

          This is just wrong. Modern formats have astonishingly better reproduction, especially for images of things like text. Some formats are also designed to mitigate artifacts caused by re-saving. No more “too much JPEG”.

          All that being said, I don’t think WebP is the answer. JPEG-XL is better in so many ways, and if we’re going to make a switch, it should be to a format that is definitively the best option.

    • Bene7rddso@feddit.deEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Webp… For web pictures. Then why are there webp files on my non web harddrives? Give me PNG

      You know what the N in PNG stands for?

  • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    I just hate that Meta Messenger (where I communicate most with my friends) doesn’t let me share webp images. Also it labels them as gif.