You’re not the only person to share that sentiment. I post a lot. Few reasons.
To try and help build Lemmy. Need to have an influx of new material consistently or things get stale and drop off.
To make other people sick of me so they start posting themselves which just goes back to point 1.
Because I am suicidally depressed and the constant posting/reacting to notifications distracts me from my own problems long enough that I get to breathe without hating the fact that I am.
I have been stockpiling stuff for years for seemingly no reason. By posting, I can justify my past memegoblin behavior.
It performs no better than existing formats and only serves to fracture format adoption and usage with no benefit. In fact it has costlier compression, and currently has exploited vulnerabilities with a cvss over 8. If you have no techical interest in the subject, you could at least not be an asshole.
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.
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?!
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.
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?
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.
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 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?
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’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.
I’m not sure if this will work for everyone, but when I want to share something from the web with my iphone, I just change the file name from “somememe.webp” to “somememe.png” and it works fine.
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).
If I didn’t have an extension to convert to PNG then idk what I would do. I guess I’d just stop sharing memes forever because the corporates made meme sharing technology proprietary? That’s sad as hell.
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