cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2207898

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.

  • Gianni REnglish
    5•11 months ago

    If you look into it a bit more, the resistance around WebP is mainly because it has some crippling weaknesses. I did some visual quality testing ( here, here & here ) & I (as well as many others independently) have found that for photographic images, WebP & JPEG are equals, & Google’s messaging that lossy WebP meaningfully improves upon JPEG for general visual quality per bit is misleading. That being said, WebP has some important strengths that are not often acknowledged. In addition to transparency & (really good) animation support, it also has:

    • a lossless mode that often outperforms PNG
    • great nonphotographic compression (though AVIF outperforms it here)
    • decent compression of photographic sources at lower fidelity, where it actually starts to beat JPEG by a good amount
    • Totally royalty free

    WebP’s main weaknesses are:

    • not better than JPEG for photographic images at useful fidelity
    • Confusing messaging from Google, may have led to slow adoption
    • Based on a video codec, so no progressive decode (even JPEG has this)
    • limited to 8 BPC (lossy & lossless)
    • superseded by JPEG-XL & AVIF, which are both pretty much better at everything

    JPEG-XL in particular is very promising. It faces hostility from Google but has an incredible breadth of features & strong compression performance, as well as Apple ecosystem-wide adoption on the way with the upcoming versions of macOS, iOS, ipadOS, etc. It is also royalty free. AVIF is better than WebP at everything except lossless, too.

    Feeling any which way about WebP, it is still a shame to see it transcoded to PNG. All that wasted potential …