Thread 106587431

Is WebP actually good?
Any time I try to save an image on the web, I discover the extension isn't the format and it's actually a WebP. This means it won't work in most software, and if I want to reupload it anywhere, I have to save it again into another more common format.

>Do you think 4chan will ever support webp?
Unlikely, because there's no actual benefit to them, only more costs.

>WebP is 15 years old now, but still everybody hates it
I'm old and been making websites since the 90s and remember all of these image formats and the problems they had in the early days with licensing or image size when downloading on a 33.6k modem, but none of this is relevant now. These image formats became successful by actually solving a problem and being in demand.

Why would I care if a picture of a forest is 823KB instead of 825KB? Everyone where I live has had access to hundreds of megabit fibre broadband internet which will download hundreds of such images in a second or stream video at a higher bitrate.

>supposedly a replacement for JPEG, PNG and GIF
Yet all of those formats are still in use, and preferable for their particular use case. By using WebP you make things worse.

>Pushed by Google, and required to fit with their Lighthouse guidance
This is the real reason why it's on every website. I work in the industry and I've had to force every website I work on to deliver all images as WebP. The people asking for it can't say why, other than "it says I have to use WebP to get a good score".
This has been pushed on non-technical people and they are convinced of it.

I've had the same people complain to me of the delayed speed of their header loading on their website on phones, and I've had to point out to them that the cause is WebP decoding being processor intensive. They've saved 3KB on a file when everyone has extremely fast internet, yet requiring the device to spend a second of processing time to decode and render the image, at a time when everyone is browsing the internet on small energy-efficient devices.

Governments, charities and universities are particularly happy to spend money in this way, with women who have no technological knowledge being the drivers on how the money is spent.

After I pointed this out to people that they could have JPEG that loads instantly, but it would mean not using WebP, they were terrified and said they had to keep WebP in order to meet requirements from various governing bodies and accessibility guidelines that have been imposed on them.

>How come the inventor of WebP still patrols the internet looking for opportunities to defend it
Because everybody hates it and he knows it has been forced top down for no benefit.

>>106587441
>Unlikely, because there's no actual benefit to them, only more costs.

Lossy images with transparency support. PNG's compression inflates the filesize for certain types of images.