So what is attractive about webp? As a user I fucking hate it infinitely.

Transparency, animations, better compression, smaller resource usage, faster loading, still patent encumbered - though Google hands out IP right grants.

WEBP is the only format that has all of these three features: transparency, lossy compression, Safari support. JPEG fails on transparency, PNG on lossy compression, AVIF on Safari support.

I also don't see what's annoying for the user with WEBP.

Yet another standard introduced to 'improve' webpage loading speeds

Ah, btw., Safari does now support AVIF: https://caniuse.com/?search=avif But only introduced this year, so that's new.

Strangely, Chrome supports AVIF, but Edge doesn't?! So that switches the AVIF argument from Safari to Edge.

Imagine using these optimized format while using some 1mb compiled front end framework at same time

@retoor Using WEBP for a few high-res images will save you more than 1MB of bandwidth. Although that won't improve the initial page load time by that much.

@hitko when people say nuxt is so fast and shit. You don't need the shit in first place

@Fast-Nop What is annoying is: saving images from the web in a format that isn't supported anywhere.

@nururururu What, not supported? Cinnamon's standard app for displaying images (Xviewer) works for webp, so it's just clicking it in the file explorer. Gimp and Pix read it as well so that editing isn't an issue, either.

Maybe you have some shitty or outdated desktop environment, but that's not a webp issue.

@retoor I think bundled FE frameworks have their place when making a web *app* where page speed ratings are not the top priority…

@Fast-Nop it also supports lossless compression as well…

The only thing annoying about WebP is the general assumption that images will always be smaller than the source, but when converting in some ways, the resultant file is *sometimes* larger than the source file and people will neglect to check the file size…

@Fast-Nop is lossy compression important though? I think in practice lossless is good enough.

@Lensflare depends.

Small project, nope.

Exa / Zetta / Yotta projects: Hell yeah.

@Lensflare lossy compression is very very important

@Lensflare Think e.g. of product photos where the product is cut out from the background. PNG is way too large, and do you really want to use JPG and edit all the photos if you change the background in CSS? Or do you want to maintain at least two sets for light and dark mode?

@Fast-Nop I did some experiments with sizes of png and jpeg. And unless you want the photo look like garbage (high lossy compression), the differences in size were negligible.

Also apparently there are optimizer tools for png that can reduce the size further with lossy techniques. But I didn’t test how that compares to jpeg.

@Lensflare Then you did your tests wrong. JPEG vs lossless PNG is not even a discussion in terms of size.

@Lensflare Here one test on a random picture: https://d2c13moo8u717n.cloudfront.net/...

That's JPEG, 33.7kB. Load in Gimp, save as PNG: 253.3kB. A factor of 7.5 is far from negligible.

@Fast-Nop

it looks like it depends on the image dimensions since my tests were larger images.

I just tested with this image:

http://ikozmik.com/Content/Images/...

And the original jpeg size is 139 kb.

Png with IrfanView compression level 9 is 419 kb

and optimized with https://tinypng.com/ it is only 168 kb.

So you are right, png is larger in general when it comes to images like photos, but it also depends and is not always as bad as you showed with your example. It can get very close to jpeg.

@Lensflare Tinypng will switch to palette mode, and if you are willing sacrifice that much quality, jpeg will clock in even smaller - not to mention that webp and avif outperform jpeg even further.

About the only thing where PNG is useful for photos is when you need transparency, and then only as final fallback in the picture tag so that even completely outdated browsers will display something.

@Lensflare png is a complex format. Macromedia fireworks used png's as project files with everything in it like complete library. It's a container format

@Fast-Nop Gimp reads *some* of them. ImageMagick doesn't, or didn't the last time I tried. Xfce generates thumbnails for them. A lot of chat apps won't even attempt to render it, they just send it as a random file. A lot of phones don't have support for it yet either.

@Parzi When was the last time you checked? 8 years ago? Because ImageMagick 6 was perfectly capable of handling webp back in 2016. Android had support for webp at least since version 4.3, which came out in 2012. Apple added support for webp on iOS 14, released in 2020.

@hitko ImageMagick didn't work with them as of 2021, though I was using Debian Buster at the time. Current Sid branch version does handle them.

My phone will open ~40% of them and reject others, versions attached. There are still phones being made to this day that don't support large sets of modern codecs, and i'm not actually sure why, because as you stated, it's been in vanilla Android for forever.

@Parzi the usual.

Packaging.

Just cause upstream does have it, doesn't mean downstream can package and provide it.

@IntrusionCM That's the problem - software developers work hard to make the best product they can, but it doesn't fucking matter because the actual distros and vendors who provide the software to the end user just skip a bunch of "optional" features. And if you do a quick google search, you learn that you need to install some additional libraries to get the full functionality (https://stackoverflow.com/questions...); however, most users just never get to that point and instead assume things don't work.

@Fast-Nop many great points. ✅

but regarding why it sucks to download webp as a use (I minor issue but still) - if you're saving files to use in some software other than a specific image processor: many programs lack support. Can't use a Web as a desktop wallpaper on many systems, for example.

@jiraTicket I just tried it in Cinnamon (Mint 21.2). Right-click in Nemo, set as wallpaper, works. Both with webp and avif. It's not the format's issue if people use crappy or outdated DEs.