Yoshark

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.

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.

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:

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!