fluffy
@fluffy

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.


twi
@twi

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


blorgblorgblorg
@blorgblorgblorg

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


blorgblorgblorg
@blorgblorgblorg

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.


blorgblorgblorg
@blorgblorgblorg

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????


wildweasel
@wildweasel

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.


nex3
@nex3

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.


  1. 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.


lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

here is a picture

it is one of very many that would have shipped with a visual novel we never finished

the thing is, even with optipng -o9 thrown at it, the original is 317.3 KiB. that is the smallest that png seems capable of storing this image. this is one of a dozen or so poses for one of like 40 characters. that's a lot of artwork size to ship and we haven't even gotten to CGs yet

compare:

png317 KiB
webp, lossless207 KiB
webp, lossy, 99% quality97 KiB
webp, lossy, 95% quality72 KiB
webp, lossy, 90% quality55 KiB

and this is what webp can do that's new: lossy encoding of images with an alpha channel. jpeg does not support an alpha channel. png does not support lossy encoding.

also, the lossy encoding is pretty solid. there are three versions of the picture because the first one is png, the second is 95% webp, and the third is 90% webp. i can tell the difference between the first and third — some detail in the grainy overlay is lost — but 95% is pretty goddamn close even toggling back and forth at 2× zoom. 99% is goddamn near identical. and i am fairly sensitive to lossy image noise

and if i decide i don't like lossy encoding at all, lossless webp is still one-third smaller. that means the game downloads faster, and the images are likely to load faster

and webp isn't even cutting-edge! newer formats are better at this!

edit: also the adoption seems fine to me. twitter, discord, cohost all accept webp. my file browser shows webp thumbnails. imagemagick supports webp. krita, gimp, aseprite support webp. i'm not sure i have any software on my computer that handles images and doesn't support webp. if you paid for software and it can't even open images your web browser natively supports, complain to the vendor!


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in reply to @whatnames's post:

The best i was able to do without installing addons, was to go into about:config in firefox and put "*/*;q=0.8,image.webp;q=0.0" as the value for key "image.http.accept".

It resulted in FF telling the sites that it doesn't like getting webp formatted images. It won't work everywhere, but for sites with content negotiation (like wikia and its images) i get more conventional formats now.

Funny, just yesterday on a certain other site I saw a thread of people lamenting how it wasn't in wider use. I'm a layman so I don't know anything either way but the small file-size seemed cool?

It's nice if you run a website and don't want to pay extra for transfer, especially with huge traffic and a lot of images served (short: smol size good). But as a person who wants to save the image from such site and use it for anything (like a quick dumb meme done in mspaint, or even use it as your desktop wallpaper) you're out of luck because the program you use most probably can't open it (short: new unsupported format bad).

Ok thanks, this is more or less the argument I've seen against it. Fair enough. I have run into it once or twice but I don't have the Gift of Memes which is probably why it hasn't bothered me to much. Now conversely, in the same thread I saw people saying that the webp format dates back to like 2001 and it just didn't ever see that much uptake. Would it be impossible now that it's getting popular for it to soon be more widely supported? Or is there something inherent to the format? Sorry for all the questions!

Main reason to look for new (or old but not widely known) image formats with stronger, lossless compression, has been web's shift to mobile (less reliable connections, having to care for transfer limits on client side). If not for that, it would probably still be an obscure format known only to a specific circle of geeks.

Big problem for wide support is range of devices and setups in the world. There's no quick switch to rollout webp everywhere all at once, unless some big enough player forces others to change their priorities - like Google did its huge part for widespread https use for all websites, or when Apple basically killed off flash player on web by completely dropping the support on iPhones. For image formats, there's seemingly no easy way to do such huge shift, since webp is not going to replace png/jpeg/gif (just coexist with them), so there's nothing that could be sacrificed to force everyone to move to new formats.

JFIF is the technical term for the file format, but for whatever reason they went with the .jpg/.jpeg file extension back in the day. The real issue there is that things care about the file extension (which is for humans) rather than the file contents (which is for computers).

Me too. I use a recent enough Linux Mint (20.2), and webp doesn't generate thumbnails in the file browser and the default app to open them is the web browser, not the image viewer.
There's zero adoption. But worst of all is the name. WEBP is such a joyless, generic name... Why would I want all my images to be named after the web?? Is the web taking credit for images now? and four letters too, which is -1 points right away.
It might be a slightly better format (Who knows?), but is a small improvement worth this utter lack of appeal?

in reply to @twi's post:

It's about time we all admitted that approximately everything after HTML4 and the 64-color animated gif was a colossal mistake we've simply been compounding ever since

in reply to @blorgblorgblorg's post:

“Negligibly smaller” is wrong—they’re frequently twice as small, if you don’t care about that it’s probably because you have good internet! But lots of people still don’t and especially mobile connections. It’s objectively a good format for the web! You should be mad that people making desktop applications are still doing a terrible job supporting it.

JPEG XL is dramatically better than webp (which is really only good because most other image codecs are 25+ years old and we’ve learned a lot in that time) and I’m very worried that it’s going to get trashed the same way.

you conflated two different things i said here! i had literally no idea that lossy webp was any smaller than jpeg, i was being derisive about file size specifically in the context of huge high-res phone camera pics in HEIC. the webp part i was literally asking what it offered me as a user!

Even on smartphones with high-resolution sensors HEIC is better. In a simple still-life shot of a building shot with my 12MP iPhone camera the HEIC image was 2.5MB and the JPEG of the same scene was 3.8MB.

Now sure, that's just a single photo, but consider that people use their phones as their only camera and quickly fill them up. I sure have on my phone, many times over. A 1MB savings (roughly, depends on the contents of the photo) per shot REALLY adds up when you're dealing with thousands of photos.

If modern day website-havers are concerned about people's internet connections then maybe instead of worring about png filesize, they could do something like serve html pages instead of 200mb javascript webapps.

in reply to @blorgblorgblorg's post:

Ok I understand what you're saying here but so many of my idiot teenage students have to delete shit EVERY YEAR so that I can make them download the mandatory apps they need to turn in their schoolwork (Like Teams or Outlook) and they always have 70,000 saved snapchat jpegs or videos or fucking whatever it BAFFLES MY MIND.

in reply to @blorgblorgblorg's post:

My understanding is:

  • webp can be lossy OR lossless
  • smaller file size saves bandwidth and storage space, which might not be huge to you but adds up for sites paying hosting costs to serve millions of images, and is a big deal for people with slow internet loading a page with lots of images
  • supports partial alpha transparency AND animation at the same time, something GIF can't do

in reply to @lexyeevee's post: