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.

  • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

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

    Give me JPEG XL or give me death, motherfuckers.

  • macniel@feddit.deEnglish
    1·
    2 years 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.

    • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      01·
      2 years ago

      Kill him. Kill him now.

      Seriously… Please don’t. Or at least don’t ever share that shit back to the web. It gets even worse when people then rename the png to jpg and it’s a whole fucking mess. I’ve been trying to figure out where the hell all those bloated hi-res pngs all over the web come from, until I stumbled upon this answer.

      Just download an updated app that can read webp for crying out loud. Do people convert x265 to QuickTime too?

      Besides, everywhere where I’ve encountered webp in the wild, the image url has something like ?format=webp at the end, so you can just delete that and get the original, if you really have to.

  • Lexica@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

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

    • Kichae@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years 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
        1·
        2 years 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?

    • Droggl@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 years 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.

  • bouh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years 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
      01·
      2 years 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
    1·
    2 years 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 …

  • ChrislyBear@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I’m against using a Google OS (Android, Chrome OS), to browse on a Google regulated web (Manifest V3), based on a Google protocol (Protobuf) loading pages via Google proxies (Google AMP) filled with Google Ads displayed using a Google format (webp, webm), while everything is recorded and fingerprinted to update my Google Ad Profile.

    No, thank you very much!

    More open formats, more open Internet! Down with Google!

      • ChrislyBear@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        They say that their format is open. In reality, it’s them who exclusively control the definition and further evolution of the format.

        For as long as they continue to support and release code for open formats, there’s hardly an argument here.

        That’s exactly the issue. We are dependent on Google’s goodwill and if they decide to scrap it or collect license fees for it we’re shit out of luck.