2y ago

Begun, the format war has

Did you ever hear the tragedy of WebP The Efficient? I thought not. It’s not a story the GIF gang would tell you. It’s an image legend.

WebP was a new format of pictures, so efficient and so lightweight, it could use modern compression to influence the web pages to actually load faster…

It had such a knowledge of the user's needs that it could even keep transparency and animations from dying.

The power of modern computing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

It became so widespread… The only thing we had to be afraid of, was people insisting on using formats from the 90's, which eventually, of course, they did.

Unfortunately, we didn't teach the noobs everything we knew about compression, then the noobs killed the format by converting it to PNG and sharing that.

Ironic. We could save the web from being too slow, but not from the users.

Memes @lemmy.ml

WhoRoger @lemmy.world

2y ago

Begun, the format war has

74 comments

Make default programs support opening webp files and the problem goes away. Until that happens users have every reason to convert files from a format that is a pain in the ass to open.
- Make default programs support JPEG XL and the problem goes away, too, all with less Google.
  
  Naming a compression scheme “XL” seems like a bad choice.
  
  Yes PLEASE, JXL is just way superior and it's got the benefit of already having JPEG in its name which should ease widespread adoption. I never liked webp and it can seriously get lost.
  
  I highly doubt they use webp to further their ambitions in web-supperiority. They just wanted something where they don't have to pay license fees.
- This. No programs I routinely use images for support it.
  
  Can you list at least a few? Everyone's like "noooo my apps don't support it" but nobody says what apps, what are y'all afraid to admit that you use MS Paint or what?
- They do.
  Photos in windows supports it. Preview on Mac OS/photos on iOS supports it. I assume anything android would support it as well. Plus every web browser supports it.
  
  Photos in windows supports it
  It does? Ive tried to use photos to open it before. Its impossible to associate the file with Photos intuitively. I am about to start directly editing my registry to see if i can do it there. (Windows 10, very custom so that might be the issue, I will try on a vanilla copy)
  
  But it took a while for it, and many people are probably running old software without the updates, so at this point the hate has cemented.
  
  Web browsers may support it, but websites often do not (for upload).
Nothing to do with users. Operating systems don't support it in their default file managers and viewers.
- I can view webp easily on both windows and Linux, but I don't use the default windows photo viewer because it started sucking a few years ago. I don't even know what I use
  
  Irfanview perhaps?
- Irfanview for life.
  
  Imageglass
- What operating systems?
- Will the real MrPoopyButthole please stand up?
  
  @MrPoopyButthole@lemmy.world @MrPoopyButthole@lemm.ee ouuuuweee
- I've read this a few times over the last few days, but at least the windows image viewer does I believe?
- Most do. But i wouldn't be surprised if Windows Photo Viewer didn't. In this case, please install a sane third party alternative, like with most Windows tools.
  Btw, isn't webp opened in the browser by default?
  
  In Chrome it does.
Lemmy converts all uploads to webp.
Also the reason people don't like it is because gallery apps and the like are behind the times, so you can't just, open webps, sometimes.
- Lemmy converts all uploads to webp.
  Does it? I downloaded this post from Liftoff, it's a jpg.
  
  At least my instance does. You're right, this post is hosted on .world and is a jpg.
- And Discord doesn't like webp as format for custom emotes. That's the main reason I've been converting them to png or gif
Lack of good integrated support in Windows and Mac, as well as no native way to convert from webp means it is good when it is good, but infuriating when it is bad. If you just need something to work, you don't want to fight with converting image formats, you just want to move on.
I supported the idea of webp, still do, but it's 100% less widely supported on legacy software, and the OS does nothing to interpret for those software packages.
- it's a compressed image format you shouldn't be converting between them
  
  Conversion is better than useless. I was caught out by it recently. I was sent an image (for a product return). Unfortunately the upload process wouldn't even see webp files.
  Obviously, the best solution is to extend support as widely as possible as quickly as possible. As an interim we also need to be able to use those files, despite the target software not supporting them.
  
  I should be able to convert whatever I want.
Please stop running bloated websites with megabytes of dependencies on my chromebook or Walmart PC with a Intel Celeron that is 6 times slower yes I benchmarked them than my phone then maybe I would consider webp.
All in all though seriously; the only good thing about webp and the only way to get good performance out of it is to make your own site on something like Neo Cities from hand crafted html5, css and JavaScript and not load bloated dependencies.
Plus in general people would rather use png because it can be viewed on everything and some websites and services outright refuse to support webp so why not use png or jpg-xl?
- Plus in general people would rather use png because it can be viewed on everything and some websites and services outright refuse to support webp so why not use png or jpg-xl?
  Because PNG files are lossless and way higher quality than you need for sharing a meme over Discord. Using the extra 3MB isn't worth it unless you can't avoid it. And Jpeg XL is not supported by any browser right now and Chromium removed support entirely. Thus it's most likely dead in the water, sadly. Your only other option for most things is regular old jpeg, which has all the old problems like lacking transparency.
  
  Chromium removed support entirely.
  Wow, fuck Google.
The take-home message here is definitely that WebP is secretly evil :P
- From my point of view, gif is evil!
  (Seriously, I have a real light-axe to grind when it comes to gif. I can live with jpeg, but the 80MB 10-second crappy gifs people keep sharing, make me lose my Jedi patience.)
A lot of the complaints I've heard come from streamers who've tried to grab a picture off the internet for something only to have OBS reject it. Supposedly OBS has webp support, but in practice it seems like streamers have been having issues with it. Other than that, I think it's just people being like, "what the fuck is this weird format and why doesn't [random photo app] support it?"
In order for a standard to survive, it has to achieve mass appeal. There are a number of physical media formats that were objectively superior to what became the standard (DVD vs d-vhs comes to mind), however the emerging standard was simpler and easier to understand, so we used that instead.
- Dude, it's not just OBS. I'm not a streamer. Most things do not play nicely with webp.
  I am a DM and I'm constantly downloading artwork to make tokens or maps to slightly tweak to fit my purposes. Webp is the bane of my existence because no one supports it. The image viewer I use doesn't support it. The file thumbnail gets stuck as a white square. The token maker website doesn't support it and the program I have claims to support it but won't load in the image. The moving webps are supposedly supported by a VTT I was considering but again they just never loaded properly or loaded as a still image. I recall sending a webp on discord and instead of displaying the image inline it just showed it as an attachment.
  I don't care about file extensions. I've never had an opinion over which one is my favorite. Do I like png or jpeg? Don't care. But I hate webp because so far it has been functionally worthless to me be cause seemingly no one supports it.
  Sure. Might be better quality. Might be tiny and amazing. Might be hyper efficient. But if I can't use it after I save it, or that I have to jump through hoops to use it, then he fucks the point?
  
  Sorry, I think I might have come off as condescending when I didn't mean to. I was just trying to say that the only people I've seen have issues with it were streamers. I failed to connect that with the fact that streamers can have a large audience; and that their viewers are typically people who are technologically savvy enough to be "tech support" for their friends and family, but not savvy enough to know that webp is technically a superior, albiet undersupported, format. As such, a negative view of webp spreads faster than a positive one, potentially impacting adoption.
  I also didn't mean to invalidate your experiences, I simply haven't had anyone to play DnD in a while. I've also never tried to DM, so I hadn't run into the issues that you're having.
  
  I'm also a DM. I use foundry, which does support webp files. I can store literally 1000s of images for a fraction of space, and use that extra space for extra modules and even more content for my players.
Jpeg XL!
The major software companies will decide your fate.
- If history is any indicator, the major porn companies will decide it.
Confession time: I didn't realise webp was an image format - whenever searches came up with it, I assumed it was some shenanigans designed to prevent me stealing it ... so I, um, took a screenshot of it,
In my defence, Windows doesn't classify them as image files (rather as Internet Edge HTML Documents), and IrfanView32 (which you can tell is a great app 'cos its got '32' in its name) doesn't support them. I've since realised that GIMP and MS Paint do open them though.
- Well, at least you now know, so that's a few less png screenshots of photos in existence.
  I remember IrfanView well, is that no longer developed? I've always preferred XnView which still exists and with its support for 500 image formats, ya'll never never have a problem opening anything that has valid image data in it.
  
  It's still being developed by the look of it. I think I just have to get a different version of it from the one I've got. It was the first app I used that let me navigate through a directory's pictures with the arrow keys, so that's why I've got a soft spot for it.
- IrfanView supports them via plugin.
I hope AVIF gets a different fate. Problem is mostly that not every app opens it. I made my screenshots in AVIF for a while but had to stop doing it because not everybody could open the images properly...
- That looks like a nice format
  
  I can't decide which I like more, AVIF or JXL. If you'd have asked me last month I would have said AVIF, but as I'm reading more about JXL I'm liking it a lot!
why is webp always so problematic?

74 comments