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.
Make default programs support opening webp files and the problem goes away. Until that happens users have every reason to convert files from a format that is a pain in the ass to open.
Yes PLEASE, JXL is just way superior and it's got the benefit of already having JPEG in its name which should ease widespread adoption. I never liked webp and it can seriously get lost.
Can you list at least a few? Everyone's like "noooo my apps don't support it" but nobody says what apps, what are y'all afraid to admit that you use MS Paint or what?
Photos in windows supports it. Preview on Mac OS/photos on iOS supports it. I assume anything android would support it as well. Plus every web browser supports it.
It does? Ive tried to use photos to open it before. Its impossible to associate the file with Photos intuitively. I am about to start directly editing my registry to see if i can do it there. (Windows 10, very custom so that might be the issue, I will try on a vanilla copy)
I can view webp easily on both windows and Linux, but I don't use the default windows photo viewer because it started sucking a few years ago. I don't even know what I use
Lack of good integrated support in Windows and Mac, as well as no native way to convert from webp means it is good when it is good, but infuriating when it is bad. If you just need something to work, you don't want to fight with converting image formats, you just want to move on.
I supported the idea of webp, still do, but it's 100% less widely supported on legacy software, and the OS does nothing to interpret for those software packages.
Conversion is better than useless. I was caught out by it recently. I was sent an image (for a product return). Unfortunately the upload process wouldn't even see webp files.
Obviously, the best solution is to extend support as widely as possible as quickly as possible. As an interim we also need to be able to use those files, despite the target software not supporting them.
Please stop running bloated websites with megabytes of dependencies on my chromebook or Walmart PC with a Intel Celeron that is 6 times slower yes I benchmarked them than my phone then maybe I would consider webp.
All in all though seriously; the only good thing about webp and the only way to get good performance out of it is to make your own site on something like Neo Cities from hand crafted html5, css and JavaScript and not load bloated dependencies.
Plus in general people would rather use png because it can be viewed on everything and some websites and services outright refuse to support webp so why not use png or jpg-xl?
Plus in general people would rather use png because it can be viewed on everything and some websites and services outright refuse to support webp so why not use png or jpg-xl?
Because PNG files are lossless and way higher quality than you need for sharing a meme over Discord. Using the extra 3MB isn't worth it unless you can't avoid it. And Jpeg XL is not supported by any browser right now and Chromium removed support entirely. Thus it's most likely dead in the water, sadly. Your only other option for most things is regular old jpeg, which has all the old problems like lacking transparency.
(Seriously, I have a real light-axe to grind when it comes to gif. I can live with jpeg, but the 80MB 10-second crappy gifs people keep sharing, make me lose my Jedi patience.)
A lot of the complaints I've heard come from streamers who've tried to grab a picture off the internet for something only to have OBS reject it. Supposedly OBS has webp support, but in practice it seems like streamers have been having issues with it. Other than that, I think it's just people being like, "what the fuck is this weird format and why doesn't [random photo app] support it?"
In order for a standard to survive, it has to achieve mass appeal. There are a number of physical media formats that were objectively superior to what became the standard (DVD vs d-vhs comes to mind), however the emerging standard was simpler and easier to understand, so we used that instead.
Confession time: I didn't realise webp was an image format - whenever searches came up with it, I assumed it was some shenanigans designed to prevent me stealing it ... so I, um, took a screenshot of it,
In my defence, Windows doesn't classify them as image files (rather as Internet Edge HTML Documents), and IrfanView32 (which you can tell is a great app 'cos its got '32' in its name) doesn't support them. I've since realised that GIMP and MS Paint do open them though.
Well, at least you now know, so that's a few less png screenshots of photos in existence.
I remember IrfanView well, is that no longer developed? I've always preferred XnView which still exists and with its support for 500 image formats, ya'll never never have a problem opening anything that has valid image data in it.
It's still being developed by the look of it. I think I just have to get a different version of it from the one I've got. It was the first app I used that let me navigate through a directory's pictures with the arrow keys, so that's why I've got a soft spot for it.
I hope AVIF gets a different fate. Problem is mostly that not every app opens it. I made my screenshots in AVIF for a while but had to stop doing it because not everybody could open the images properly...
I can't decide which I like more, AVIF or JXL. If you'd have asked me last month I would have said AVIF, but as I'm reading more about JXL I'm liking it a lot!