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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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 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.
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’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.
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.
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