Webp
Developed by google, for google products.
Not guaranteed to work with google products (looking at you google voice.)
Guaranteed support will be dropped at random in the future.
Probably because nobody uses it.
The whole “Google will kill it” meme is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Google creates thing.
Everyone thinks Google will kill that thing, so nobody uses it.
Google kills the thing because nobody uses it.
And the cycle continues.
The Google Way.
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!
Save a lot more debloating your code. Storage is cheap. Processing power is not.
There are still places where bandwidth is a bottleneck, even on internal network is essential to optimize for bandwidth
People just really need to support it. It’s far better than jpg or png. It’s the go-to for web right now, that’s for sure.
Not better than jpegXL which has clearer free licensing.
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.
Firefox supports JXL just fine and chrome did support it, but pulled support shortly after.
This is the source I used to originally validate my position: https://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.
But why is it better? My experience is clicking on webp format opens in browser instead of my image viewer
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 is smaller, better, and faster.
I wish everyone would get on the same page so it would also be better for the end user.
People just really need to support it.
This right here sir. You missed this part.
I’m a layperson. I don’t care about what technical benefits it has on paper when its impractical to use. So I have to agree with OP on this one.
I haven’t seen a single browser that didn’t support webp
Lots of image viewers and media programs/apps dont support it currently. Which is a hassle when you’ve downloaded a webp and cant view or edit it.
Sounds like you need upgrade your image viewer? Everything else is loading it fine.
I use FastStone Image Viewer. Maybe there’s a plug-in I need to install?
It has more efficient lossy compression then JPEG. It has more efficient lossless compression then PNG. More efficient compression then gif and supports animation like gif. It allows for more colors then any of those 3. You can have a single for extension for photos graphics, and animations and costs less storage and bandwidth saving money and making a better ui.
As someone who has had to put together websites:
- It is supported by every major browser
- It is halving the amount of your mobile data that I am using sending you images (With lossy compression it does even better)
- It is decreasing my network egress costs
- It is increasing the number of connections I can serve in a given time period
Nope I am not going to stop using this or AVIF (which does better)
It’s straight up better though
So was Betamax
No it wasn’t.
AVIF wants to know your location
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
The format is fine. The rate of bugs in image parsing code in general is alarming but that is true of just about all the formats.
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.
WebP is awesome. So is JPEG-XL.
JPEG and PNG are archaic and should die already.
.jxl is also coming btw
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.
Is this the latest hate trend? Is it that time of the year again?
Tis the season for strong weird opinions and needing someone else’s website to run imagemagick commands for you.
Where have you been for the last few years lol
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).
How can one even get annoyed this much by WebP lol
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.
I use an extension that automatically converts it. I can’t stand webp
If it’s for firefox then I’m gonna need the name of said extension
Not OP, but I’ve been using WebP / Avif image converter for many months now and am very satisfied with it.
I love you
Stamets, I hope this isn’t weird, half the time I find something I actually comment on, it’s one of your posts. Why is that?
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’s fun
Ah yes. I, too, exist merely out of spite lmao
Wow weirdo
I don’t save comments often, but I saved this one. Trying to deal with this format is exceedingly tedious at scale
yo just search for “save webp as” firefox extension. I got it specifically for this (lots of d&d sites use webp)
bro it’s an image format how does it affect you in any way? “oh no this file is .webp rather than .png my life is over”
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.
Also some computers will just fail to load larger png’s from foundry, leaving some players with a black background. Never had that happen with a webp.
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.
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.
Cell connectivity.
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.
Large companies that serve a ton of content. CDNs, image hosts, Google, Facebook, etc. 1% of their traffic adds up to a lot.
Also people in limited bandwidth situations - satellite links, Antarctica, developing countries, airplanes, etc.
Finally, embedded systems. The esp32 for example has 520kb of ram.
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?!
Um, not to be nosy, but, how did you get from money to flesh, blood and life energies?
Where I’m from, a frigid corner of the 9th circle of hell, both the United States Dollar and Tears of the Innocent are used interchangeably.
You should look into investing first borns. Highly lucrative section of the tears of the innocent market.
Makes sense, best of luck on your harvest ^^
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.
But maybe 500 people are posting 1 MB images? These concepts ain’t hard, mate.
If your web page has 1 mb jpegs, sure, you need webp. Because you don’t know how to add appropriately-sized images.
Again, a jpeg of png of a 27" monitor screenshot is like 50kb.
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?
That’s not how Macs work.
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
If jpg and png we’re good enough for dialup, they’re good enough for gigabit.
Tell that to Google’s SEO ratings. A website using jpeg’s is not going to do well.
I’m a little out of the loop on webp. What makes it problematic?
A lot of things don’t support it yet, but it’s technically a better compression format
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.
WebP is in no way new
It came out in the past 15 years. Most “common” formats like png and jpg came out in the 90s. Others like tif, bmp, and gif are from the 80s.
So yeah, it is “new”, it’s just very relative.
Yea I have nothing against WebP myself. I also wish HEIC was more widely supported
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.
Oh didn’t know that, that sucks
Not really though
Better than JPEGxl?
