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
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.
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.
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.
This is the source I used to originally validate my position: 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.
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.
From someone using foundry, please continue to use webp and webm… Foundry easily supports it and the file sizes are much smaller making them take up much less space on my server. And upload faster, and load faster for me and my players, and let me upload larger maps for my players as they render easier.
My god, yes. The .webp file format is consistently half the size of .jpeg and improves load times considerably.
Also, just use paint.net like a normal person. Or GIMP. Practically any image editor worth the name will let you save in .webp format and every browser can handle it.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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).
It would be nice if mobile browsers/apps would convert them. When I save a webp and want to share it… Whelp, can’t do that - doesn’t even show up in the list of images.
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.
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.
Nope. JPEG XL is more modern and delivers lower file sizes without fucking up image quality as much. Downside is that, right now, JPEG XL is actually supported by even less things, because it is still so new.
But it is an industry standard rather than just Google trying to push its own thing, so I do expect it to overtake WebP in a few years.
This is how every new thing starts though. You don’t just get better standards overnight. Jpg and png didn’t happen overnight either. PNG had this problem for quite a while.
It’s not a problem with WebP. It’s a problem with tooling that aren’t moving forwards to objectively more effective formats.
HEIC now has a licensing cost to it, meaning devs have to pay to make their software able to open it. Microsoft recently removed HEIC support from their software because of it.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?!
“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.
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
Thanks. I remember Google news showing an article about them already deprecating webp but now I don’t see it. I wonder what format the article was about.
Akamai supports it as a transparent speed optimization for clients who want it. My employers website is fairly image-heavy and we use Akamai’s Image Manager to optimize images for us. The first time an image is fetched by their CDN they analyze it to optimize it for size, compression, and image type, and all the rendered versions are cached on their CDN. When a client requests the image Akamai will look at the characteristics of the device and serve the best optimized version of the image.
Not sure, but thy might. They’re constantly looking for ways to reduce traffic by even a couple bytes. They claim their servers see something like 30% of all web traffic, so if they can squeeze even a few bytes more out of something then it can have a pretty big impact overall.
One other thing they recently rolled out is a similar form of transparent support for Brotli compression. Many websites, CDN’s, etc. will automatically compress fonts, JavaScript, etc. using gzip if the client browser supports it (and most do). Brotli is a newer compression algorithm that sometimes is better than gzip, but not always. Many browsers now support Brotli as an option along with gzip, so Akamai will transparently convert gzipped items to Brotli, and if it generates a smaller file then they’ll serve that version to browsers that support it.
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