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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.