Begun, the format war has
Begun, the format war has
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.
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You can also use the don't accept images/webp addon so the browser will tell the site its "not capable" of displaying webp, and will usually fall back to a jpg or png alternative. Only works on some sites- lemmy is an exception as all directly uploaded images are stored exclusively in webp.
Lemmy pictures urls are like https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/bd5d40ad-c304-4ab4-a70a-977da17a16f9.jpeg?format=webp and you can just delete the last parameter to get a jpg.
The jpg here has only 20 bytes size difference to my original. I don't think it's getting recompressed to webp and then back to jpg, although I can't compare it on a byte level atm.
With only a 20 byte difference, why not use a format that's universally accepted? I can't text a webp to my chat group, send over discord, or use as a base for stable diffusion image2image.
I meant 20 bytes difference is between the jpg on lemmy and my original jpg, indicating that it's not recompressed.
The webp is much smaller of course.
I get that crappy apps don't support anything but formats from 30 years ago, but we really need to get the ball rolling to get something newer widely supported. As video formats were developing from DivX through Xvid, Matroska and h/x264 to x265 and beyond, developers and people would just update their codecs and apps, and nobody had a problem with it. Dunno why that can't work with pictures once in 20 years.
