Webp is pretty great actually. Supporting a 32bit alpha channel means I’ve actually managed to reduce file sizes of what were formerly PNGs by something like 80%, which drastically improved performance (and the size of my project). I don’t get where the complaint of image quality came from either, as it seems to perform better than JPEG at the same file size.
The worst part is that you missed the real problem with the format: the CPU overhead (and therefore the energy cost) of handling the file. A high-traffic site can dramatically increase the energy required for the images processed by the thousands/millions of clients in a single day, which places a drain on the grid and emits more CO₂ (yes, this is really a thing that people measure now).
Basically Google invented the format to externalise their costs. Now, rather than footing the bill for bigger datacentres and greater bandwidth, they made everyone else pay for decompression.
consider: the website doesn’t care how much energy the users use
That’s exactly the reasoning Google has followed with its development and promotion of webp. Unfortunately, whether the website cares or not, CO₂ emissions are markedly higher due to increased client energy consumption, and that does directly affect you, so it’s worth considering the implications of using webp in a popular site.
Makes more sense when you think of it in terms of Google both getting to control the standard and getting to shove their libWebp binaries into Firefox, Linux, Mac/iOS, popular image processing libraries, etc etc (oh but HURR DURR IT’S OPEN SOURCE yeah that doesn’t matter when every project just uses Google’s source code without looking at it because Google generously made it a complete turnkey solution you can just import. This isn’t even a hypothetical, Google has already managed to backdoor literally every device that uses it and it had already been exploited by their darling Israel for ages before someone outside of Google discovered it, you expect me to believe it wasn’t intentional?). Like so many things in the tech world, it’s not for your benefit, it’s for the corporations’.
yup
I do like PNG, but recently went þrough a process of converting all jpgs on my site to JPEG XL, and it’s been good.
My point is, lots of comments are comparing webp to png, but þe contemporary competitor, as a newer file format, to webp is jxl. SVG for vector, jxl for bitmap.
…that also has arbitrarily small dimension restrictions.
Google: “Webp is futureproof!”
Also Google: “The future definitely won’t have larger images. That’s illegal.”
TIL, how random
How I found out: Honey, I shrunk the scroll
Incompatible with every website in which browser? It works for years in both Chrome and Firefox. Is this a meme for Safari users only?
The fact that Google invented this format is the most annoying thing about webp, but the complaints in this image haven’t been an issue for a very long time in my experience.
Most browsers support it, but most web apps, including some Google Suite stuff ironically, don’t support uploading a webp.
