webp is a good format that's saddled with lousy adoption. Back in the day people avoided png because of the same problem. Things will get better if you let them.
webp is a good format that's saddled with lousy adoption
i've been saying this and probably will be forever. so many people in the comments on this one complaining about not being able to use it for stuff and i have to resist the temptation to tell them to just..... get ffmpeg. it's not out of the question that some of these people even already have it in their path variable somewhere. it is not remotely difficult to use as long as you don't wanna customize the conversion settings, but i know that people are now and will forever remain allergic to the command line. no shade for that, there's plenty of things i avoid using because i just don't fuckin wanna. but i had many of the same annoyances for a long time and realizing i had access to a one-liner that you can literally do in the windows file explorer address bar without so much as opening a terminal window (though i usually do anyway just for tab-complete my beloved) just completely evaporated them. for the terminal-averse, one could probably devise a registry key to give the context menu an option to handle the conversion.....
or, if you're downloading it to edit, just hit "copy image" the same way you'd do with an image of literally any other format besides an animated gif. that's what you do, right, and then paste it into your image editor of choice, right? the majority of editors i use have a function upon making a new canvas to use the dimensions of the image in the clipboard, and might even paste the image right in for you. i try to avoid saving stuff that i don't actually intend to use again whenever possible, and it is annoying when my hand is forced (one day this will stop being a thing that annoys me about cohost)
i dunno about adoption ever getting much better than it is now especially since i'm not old enough to remember how true this ever was about pngs but it baffles me that i never see this ire directed toward apng, which i think is also neat, but has all the same issues at least as badly. but personally i dunno i don't blame, like, the MKV format for example for vegas pro still not supporting it? that seems like it would be daft of me
genuinely what is good about webp? it just seems to be a container you can put lossless or lossy in? what's the appeal, why should i switch
your mkv example is weird to me because mkv offers some useful extra shit to me the user over mp4 in how it can embed multiple tracks including subtitles in one file. what does webp offer me the user except inconvenience? i have ffmpeg and imagemagick in my windows path variable so i can use them in any folder but why should i have to, what purpose does webp serve? i never hear that even from its defenders, and let me tell you, "just go to slight extra effort because fandom wikis autoconvert all uploaded images to this new format" is not a compelling pitch to me in the absence of any information on why anyone would convert to webp
this is also why recent smartphones taking camera pics in HEIC weirds me out. like oh yeah it's like negligibly smaller in size? motherfucker any phone recent enough to be taking pics in HEIC has 64 gigs of internal memory bare-ass minimum, how the fuck can anyone on earth fill that up with JPEGs. i'd struggle to fill that with PNGs.
okay actually i guess i'd glossed over "back in the day people avoided png because of the same problem" which is even more ludicrous because back in the day I desperately wanted PNG to get wider support because it served a purpose in offering nicer quality than JPEGs in a SIGNIFICANTLY smaller size than BMP and with transparency. what features does webp offer????????? anyone????
Literally the only "adoption" problem PNG ever had back in the day was that Internet Explorer, while it displayed them, would display ones with alpha-translucency over an ugly 50% grey background no matter what. Every graphics program I ever used, circa 2000, supported it just fine. WebP is a format that exists because Google invented it, that offers no noticeable benefits over PNG, and punishes a website's page rank for not using it.
Learning that Fandom wikis auto-convert images to WebP format is just one of several shitty reasons why they get such high priority in search ranks and that the fan-run wikis get penalized so hard.
They are crushingly better at representing animations than GIFs and substantially better than APNG. Crucially, they support compression across frames like video formats, while APNG only supports compression within frames. I've lobbied for Cohost to support WebP specifically for this reason: I want to be able to upload small looping images for things like my AI Deep Dives without having to compromise on quality and still brush up against the 10MB Cohost Plus limit.
As a second benefit, they do generally produce smaller, better-looking lossy compression than either PNG or JPEG. This is less relevant for individual users and more relevant for websites, although again if you're trying to squeeze a large image in under a size limit it can become important pretty fast. I've heard that JPEG2000 JPEG XL might be even better on still image compression, although it's not even supported by most browsers let alone viewing/editing apps.
I'm pretty inclined to agree with @twi though: complaining about the format itself when the immediate UX failure is userland apps failing to treat it the same way they do JPEG or PNG seems wrongheaded. Even if you think WebP in particular is a vendor lock-in scheme from Google1, the exact same problem exists for APNG and JPEG XL. We should be unequivocal: if a format works in an <img> tag, it should work in apps and operating systems.
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This is a fair line of reasoning because WebP is incentivized by AMP which absolutely is a lock-in scheme, but I think it's incorrect here. I think if Google really wanted to make their format the standard they would have actually done the legwork to make it appealing to userland apps.
couple points here:
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cohost already does support animated WebP (here's a draft with a random example image I found at https://colinbendell.github.io/webperf/animated-gif-decode/webp.html) except that we don't currently detect that it's an animation and pause it. we're going to be making changes to the way we serve images as we move off of cloudflare, and once the dust settles from that we should be able to get that working as well.
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google may not be actively trying to lock people into WebP, but it's doing things which have the net effect of locking people into WebP. first, Google helped draft the open AVIF standard for lossy compression and the open JPEG XL standard for both lossy and lossless compression (like WebP), added support for AVIF and JPEG XL to Chromium, then abruptly yanked JPEG XL support less than two years later. google was also working on a direct successor to WebP called WebP 2, but abandoned it a few months ago.
second, it controls the dominant search engine, which incorporates page speed into search result rankings; it also provides its own proprietary PageSpeed tool, which recommends recompressing JPEGs into WebP but not any other next-generation image format, despite the fact that it's worked on no fewer than three different direct successors to WebP, two of which are controlled by multilateral standards bodies and both of which it's shipped support for in Chromium!
