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.

  • @[email protected]English
    92•1 year ago

    The only problem I have with .webp and .webm is that not that many applications support them and need to be converted first.

    • @[email protected]English
      34•1 year ago

      This. Many viewers still dont support it for some reason so despite all technical glory, effectively its often mostly a nuisance. Cmp ogg/vorbis and possibly countless other examples. Adoption is everything for web formats.

    • Kichae
      25•1 year ago

      No, there’s also the problem that they’re Google developed formats. I think an increasing number of us want to be done with Google as much as possible, and there are good alternatives that aren’t getting the support they need right now to give us that freedom.

      • @WhoRogerOP
        11•1 year ago

        I understand that but we really fucking need to be moving from jpegif. MP3 and MPEG2 were commercial formats too (actually so was jpeg iirc?) and look where they got us. We just really need someone to get the ball rolling to start using newer formats.

        • Gianni R
          2•1 year ago

          JPEG has always been royalty-free. It just supported arithmetic coding, which at the time was patented. Arithmetic coded JPEGs are exceedingly rare & you’re unlikely to run into any on the Web.

      • @[email protected]
        10•1 year ago

        I hate Google too, but if they are proper open specification formats and aren’t encumbered by patents, why does it matter that Google created them? Open format is open format regardless of its creator.

        Do these formats have some DRM capability or other nefarious reason to avoid them or is it just because they were created by someone we don’t like?

      • @[email protected]
        3•1 year ago

        That’s like saying that I don’t want to develop using react.js because it was created by Meta.

    • @WhoRogerOPEnglish
      5•1 year ago

      Why are so many people using image viewers from 1993? Nothing against nostalgia, but…

      • @funnystuff97English
        17•1 year ago

        Discord doesn’t support webp, that’s probably one of the biggest ones.

        • @ryannathansEnglish
          13•1 year ago

          Discord profits from big inefficient formats so you buy nitro

          • TimeSquirrel
            11•1 year ago

            Also Google Voice cannot attach webps. Literally the same company that came up with it. I gotta convert to send memes and photos to my boomer parents still using text for everything.

      • thekerker
        8•1 year ago

        For me, it’s not image viewers, but websites that take photo uploads. None of them that I’ve ever used have supported webp, so I always have to convert to png or jpg.

    • exuEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      What applications are those?