Webp
Developed by google, for google products.
Not guaranteed to work with google products (looking at you google voice.)
Guaranteed support will be dropped at random in the future.
The Google Way.
Probably because nobody uses it.
The whole “Google will kill it” meme is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Google creates thing.
Everyone thinks Google will kill that thing, so nobody uses it.
Google kills the thing because nobody uses it.
And the cycle continues.
Dunno about “nobody.” Tons of sites use it. Hell, Telegram uses it for stickers exclusively. We use it everywhere on my job’s website
Which is probably why webp still exists.
Most of the other things killed by Google follow this trend. Stadia is a glowing example of this self fulfilling prophecy.
Though, in the case of stadia, IMO, they should have probably worked harder to let people know that as long as you have a Google login and something to play with, you could have tried it without buying anything. There were a number of trials on the platform that were free to play. Since people didn’t generally know that, a lot were relying on reviewers to form an opinion, and most of the reviews were early access and wrought with issues that were quickly fixed.
I miss stadia.
Comparing any of the services or applications that Google has created to a file format is not a fair comparison at all.
You get the exact same quality at around ~25% smaller than other image formats. Unfortunate that it’s not supported by everything, but yeah it’s a better image format practically in that sense.
On the web this saves money when storing at a large scale, and it can have a significant impact on page speed when loading websites on slower connections.
My problem is the way it’s packaged as a link to a website that hosts the jpeg image. Saving, modifying, and using the image file becomes impossible in some workflows. Imagine a future where you get fined for stealing memes. I bet they could make the image file size even smaller without all of that bullshit added in, until then I’m just using an extension to convert to png (which results in loss btw).
How does converting to a lossless format cause loss?
Converting FROM a format to a DIFFERENT FORMAT can cause loss. In this case from one compressed type to another.
Only if the output format is lossy.
Or the output is a comic strip about a miscarriage.
:.|:;This is the most compressed meme
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You are saying that you use an extension to convert from WebP to PNG, right? PNG is a lossless file format. It’s compressed, but losslessly. Like zip is also lossless compression. You can remove information to make it more compressible and then it’s a lossy process, but that’s not because of PNG, but because of the specific workflow.
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Not true.
It’s already supported in many more places than it was a couple years ago. It just takes time.
I’d rather see the savings in the army of Javascript I apparently need today for the ‘modern’ web experience. Image files have gotten lots of love, but hey, here’s a shitty 27 year old language designed for validating form input!
Save a lot more debloating your code. Storage is cheap. Processing power is not.
There are still places where bandwidth is a bottleneck, even on internal network is essential to optimize for bandwidth
There are more places where bandwidth is a bottleneck now than 10 years ago.
NIC speeds have gone from 100Gbps to 800Gbps in the last few years while PCIe and DRAM speeds have nowhere increased that much. No way are you going to push all that data through to the CPU on time. Bandwidth is the bottleneck these days and will continue to be a huge issue for the foreseeable future.
People just really need to support it. It’s far better than jpg or png. It’s the go-to for web right now, that’s for sure.
Not better than jpegXL which has clearer free licensing.
Only Apple supports this. Like, literally just Apple. I hate Chrome, and even Chrome doesn’t support this. Firefox? Yeah, zero support.
So for these reasons it’s 100% not viable right now. If you get the support, I’ll consider it for my websites, and tell my colleagues about it, though.
Firefox supports JXL just fine and chrome did support it, but pulled support shortly after.
This is the source I used to originally validate my position: https://caniuse.com/jpegxl
Let me know if it’s incorrect, I’d be very interested to learn of new options for the web space as a developer. This said, I googled Firefox and it came back with only “experimental support” for what I think may be an alpha release (version number ends in “a”).
I think you still need to enable JXL in the config, but it seems to display just fine once enabled.
Adding support for JXL in windows was much more of a hassle and doesn’t always display properly in the file preview. Hopefully windows follows Apple’s step soon and adds native support.
I guess as a Web developer it won’t matter until the JXL toggle is enabled by default though.
But why is it better? My experience is clicking on webp format opens in browser instead of my image viewer
Webp supports 24 - bit RGB w 8 - bit Alpha channel. It also has better lossless and lossly compression. And it handles transparency and animation better than other formats at a smaller size.
It is smaller, better, and faster.
I wish everyone would get on the same page so it would also be better for the end user.
People just really need to support it.
This right here sir. You missed this part.
I’m a layperson. I don’t care about what technical benefits it has on paper when its impractical to use. So I have to agree with OP on this one.
I haven’t seen a single browser that didn’t support webp
Lots of image viewers and media programs/apps dont support it currently. Which is a hassle when you’ve downloaded a webp and cant view or edit it.
Sounds like you need upgrade your image viewer? Everything else is loading it fine.
I use FastStone Image Viewer. Maybe there’s a plug-in I need to install?
It’s straight up better though
So was Betamax
No it wasn’t.
I’ve seen this video but I went ahead and watched it again. I stand by that it’s a great comparison, as it clearly depends on what “better” means. Webp and consumer Beta have extremely marginal technical benefits that are mostly irrelevant to the average user, compared to the use cases people actually want, which are to record football games and use digital images in Paint or almost any other software. My comment to the first post was meant to say that, but I guess it didn’t come across that way.
WebP is definitely the VHS in this scenario - editing and creating images is NOT the most common use of image files. Not by a long shot. It’s for distribution of images, which is vastly more common a usage.
And there is nothing technically deficient about WebP for editing either - it’s just a new image format that came to popularity in the last 18 months. I’m old enough to remember JPEG being new, and it had the same things said about it. If you’re doing anything serious, both JPEG and WebP are the distribution format of your master image that you keep for yourself in a bitmap format.
The “pro” version of Betamax was good. It wasn’t the consumer version. The consumer version was no better than VHS.
AVIF wants to know your location
As someone who has had to put together websites:
- It is supported by every major browser
- It is halving the amount of your mobile data that I am using sending you images (With lossy compression it does even better)
- It is decreasing my network egress costs
- It is increasing the number of connections I can serve in a given time period
Nope I am not going to stop using this or AVIF (which does better)
Sync user!
Isn’t sync proprietary?
I don’t think so, but it might be
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Is this the latest hate trend? Is it that time of the year again?
How can one even get annoyed this much by WebP lol
at this point i will take any open image format newer than png
It supports transparency like PNGs, and animations like GIFs, and is generally not a bad format on its own due to its balance of quality and file size.
The issue is that support for it is lacking; a large number of major media applications don’t have any WebP functionality, meaning that an image being WebP format only adds an irritating extra step where you have to convert it to PNG to use it. The other issue is that the adoption of the format online is disproportionately high, compared to its adoption by major app developers. It’s bizarrely common to download an image, only to find that you can’t use it because your software (I.e. Photoshop, Clip Studio, OBS) doesn’t support it, so now you have to either convert it to PNG somehow or hunt down a new file that isn’t a WebP. For visual artists of all kinds, this is a tremendous pain in the ass, and it’s pretty obvious that it doesn’t need to be that way in the first place.
When it affects your workflow at your job.
The reason half of us have jobs is because of workflows being affected by things
I love you.
Haha you too thanks champ
libwebp
Tis the season for strong weird opinions and needing someone else’s website to run imagemagick commands for you.
Where have you been for the last few years lol
Uhh… Building apps and websites and converting images to and from webp without much of an issue. It’s kind of weird to hear about this hate on webp given that it’s a great tool. But considering it’s a Google product and that I’m kind of new to the Fediverse, it now makes sense that I missed the hate altogether. I’ve yet to meet another fellow dev with strong opinions on it.
I’ve seen it all around. People dislike it because (I’m guessing) it’s Google’s and because not everything supports it. Used to be worse of course. Over at 4chan they hate it because you can’t upload WebP there (but you can WebM, which is interesting).
The problem is rather the opposite of the meme. The file format is fine, but there is so little effort into making it happen.
If we were trying then I should be able to upload webp images everywhere. The most egregious is websites that will convert jpg and png uploads to webp but don’t allow webp upload.
webp isn’t fine, it has a ton of vulnerabilities because it’s not a safe file format. It gets to do too much and it’s insecure for that reason. That’s why you can’t upload your own webp but conversion to it is fine
The format is fine. The rate of bugs in image parsing code in general is alarming but that is true of just about all the formats.
it has a ton of vulnerabilities because it’s not a safe file format
Its a high compression image file, ffs. If someone sends you a 10 mb .webp file, that should be setting off alarm bells right off the bat. Even then, I have to ask what the hell your Windows Viewer app thinks it should be allowed to do with the file shy of rendering it into pixels on the screen.
I mean, it sounds like you’re saying, “I don’t know how it can be dangerous, therefore it’s not dangerous.”
All I’m hearing is that “its not safe” without further details. And given the utility relative to .jpeg, I’d like more on the table than just “Don’t do it! Unsafe!”
I agree the claim requires more evidence and it would be foolish to just take it at face value, but even if my intuition told me it was intrinsically safe I wouldn’t place any degree of trust in my own logical conclusions, or discount someone else’s warnings, however spurious.
The burden of proof should never be on the accuser when it comes to safety, in my opinion, or anything else of public concern. And the standard of proof should be higher to show that everything’s ok than to show that it’s not. At least in an ideal world.
I wouldn’t place any degree of trust in my own logical conclusions
Okay, but then why use .jpeg?
The burden of proof should never be on the accuser when it comes to safety
How does the .webp protocol demonstrate itself at least as safe as any other standard format? There’s no established safety standard for image protocols that I’m aware of.
I’ve personally used webp for when I need lossy compression with alpha channel. What good alternatives are there? Png is not lossy and jpeg does not support alpha. Is JXL better than WebP? AVIF? JPEG2000?
pngout can often get image sizes down below equivalent jpeg without quality loss. And it’s not a new format, just optimizing the existing png file.
JXL is nice, but lacks support as well
WebP is also great for doing animations with transparency on mobile. Transparent video is barely supported and gif is terrible. WebP is really the only option
I host my own server for playing TTRPGs on and webp saves me a lot of storage space and bandwidth.
I haven’t had an issue with webp support myself, kinda surprised to see people stating it like it happens all the time
The only tool I’ve used that didn’t support it was the FOMOD creation tool when making some small Starfield foods, and that actually DID support webp, it just threw an error but would show the image and mod managers would load it no problem
Or is this an example of the difference between people who use Linux and Windows regularly?
Want that cool image as a background? Whoops.
Want to use that image with that nifty ML tool you downloaded? Uh oh.
That random web service at least five years old with an upload field for an image? Roll the dice; win on snake eyes.
Want to use that picture as an avatar in a forum that isn’t that popular? Hmmm.
How about that WordPress blog of yours? Hopefully on 5.8 or better; otherwise unsupported natively.
Would you like thumbnails on these downloads in your favorite Linix distro? Uh, maybe; Ubuntu didn’t get it until 22.10.
How about Windows? Well, 11 is fine, but 10 needs an extension.
None of this can’t be overcome with some effort, but it’s kind of painful right now.
WebP is awesome. So is JPEG-XL.
JPEG and PNG are archaic and should die already.
.jxl is also coming btw
JPEG will never die. Too many things support it at a very basic level. A random CCD camera module on DigiKey probably has an option for direct JPEG output. An 8-bit Arduino will know how to take that JPEG and display it on a cheap 4" LCD screen off Bang Good.
Formats that sprawl everywhere like that will never, ever die.
(Which makes JpegXL even better)
I think webp is great but every time I download a webp meme to send it to my Facebook-only friends, I have to take a screenshot of the image because for some reason messenger doesn’t recognize webp images. Like cmon Zuck why can’t you do anything good…
Webp is superior to jpg and far smaller than png. Making a map tile that has transparency and is bigger than 20x20 grid squares leaves you the choice between a huge png or a tiny webp. VTTs like foundry have best practice guidelines re image sizes and formats and it is simply not possible to follow these using png unless the map in question is tiny, and if you ignore them and just go for a huge png your players may be faced with lag, longer loading times etc.
If jpg and png were good enough for dialup, they’re good enough for gigabit.
You clearly don’t recall watching jpegs load on dialup internet. It could literally take minutes to load a decent sized image on 14.4 modems.
I remember. Finished halfway through kathy_ireland_nude_boobs.jpeg
At least you got the right one. I accidently got kathy_ireland_nude_boobs.jpeg.bat. It was not the happy day I hoped it would be.
Tell that to Google’s SEO ratings. A website using jpeg’s is not going to do well.
I don’t even understand the point of webp. Why do we need to make pngs and jpegs smaller? Who has internet that can’t handle those files most of the time? It’s not like people are posting 500 mb images.
It’s not about the bandwidth and ability when you’re reducing file size. It’s the aggregate of doing so when the site has a large number of those files, multiplied by the number of times the files get pulled from a server.
It’s conserving size for the provider. Most commercial servers have metering.
Cell connectivity.
A physical internet connection doesn’t have many issues as at all with bulkier formats, but cell networks – especially legacy hardware that is yet to be upgraded – will have more issues sending as much data (i.e. more transmission errors to be corrected and thereby use up more energy, whereas the power cost of transmission error correction for cabled networks is negligible).
Even when I have one bar, as long as I have a connection, I won’t have a problem with a 50k png. A screenshot on my 27" monitor is less than that. And the legacy hardware was designed with pngs and jpegs in mind because they didn’t have webp at the time. So that really doesn’t make sense to me.
It’s less about individual small screenshots (PNGs for example are pretty large with real photographs, which can take minutes to load with a bad connection) and more about multiple images on one site. User retention is strongly affected by things like latency and loading speed. The best way to improve these metrics is to reduce network traffic. Images are usually the biggest part of a page load.
Large companies that serve a ton of content. CDNs, image hosts, Google, Facebook, etc. 1% of their traffic adds up to a lot.
Also people in limited bandwidth situations - satellite links, Antarctica, developing countries, airplanes, etc.
Finally, embedded systems. The esp32 for example has 520kb of ram.
Neither do I. I’ve heard so much from so many people about it being a ‘better’ extension in all these ways but I mean… it just comes off like audiophile-style conversations about how this specific record player with x speaker set allows for the warmth better than this other set that costs the same amount of money. That amount being your blood, various organs, and the life energies of everything in a 50 mile radius.
How is it better when no one fucking supports it?!
Um, not to be nosy, but, how did you get from money to flesh, blood and life energies?
Where I’m from, a frigid corner of the 9th circle of hell, both the United States Dollar and Tears of the Innocent are used interchangeably.
Makes sense, best of luck on your harvest ^^
When your site serves each user 20+ images and you get millions of unique users a year, saving 25-35% on each image translates into a LOT of saved bandwidth
“No one supports it” because support doesn’t just happen overnight. These things happen slowly. Same way they did with jpg and png.
Sure, part of the “better” is the audiophile “better quality” thing. But the major point is that it’s objectively a better compression. Which means less data needs to be transfered, which means things go faster. Sure people claim they “don’t notice” an individual image loading, but you rarely load one image, and image loading is often the bulk of the transfer. If we can drop that by 30%, not only does your stuff load 30% faster, but EVERYONE does, which means whoever is serving you the content can serve MORE people more frequently. Realistically, it’s actually a greater than 30% improvement because it also gets other people “out of your way” since they aren’t hogging the “pipes” as long.
But maybe 500 people are posting 1 MB images? These concepts ain’t hard, mate.
If your web page has 1 mb jpegs, sure, you need webp. Because you don’t know how to add appropriately-sized images.
Again, a jpeg of png of a 27" monitor screenshot is like 50kb.
Please extrapolate a bit. I used the numbers to make it easy for you. Let’s try again.
10 000 people posting 50 KB images. And we are right back where we started. Webp is objectively better than old JPEG.
Also, “a jpeg of(‘or’?) a png of a 27” monitor screenshot" makes no sense. Jpegs and pngs are not the same filesize for the same image, and the diagonal dimension of a monitor is irrelevant. Are we talking 1080p, 1440p, or 2160p?
That’s not how Macs work.
