So as every time I read something decrying how webp is allegedly "annoying", the conclusion is that the problem was never about webp itself but the tooling and ecosystem to handle it
yjftsjthsd-h 10 hours ago [-]
Is there a real distinction? It can be a great format, but if actually using it sucks then in practice it's a pain to use/encounter. (I don't actually have this problem personally - all my apps seem to handle it fine - but the argument seems reasonable.)
kllrnohj 10 hours ago [-]
Yes, it's important to distinguish annoyances of the codec from annoyances of the ecosystem.
Ecosystem being slow to adopt it is something that can be fixed or improved, but also more importantly (given jpegxl & avif comparisons) are things that will impact any new image format.
Meanwhile annoyances of the codec tend to be things that are dramatically harder to deal with. Like HEIC being a license minefield and also slow as shit. Or that many of these newer image codecs do not have ways to work with them in a memory efficient manner like jpeg does (see eg libjpeg-turbo's sample size & skip scanline options). Or WebP insisted on being in a RIFF container for... uh... absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever afaict. Fortunately RIFF is so trivial that this overhead doesn't actually matter in practice, but then HEIC & AVIF dials up the annoying container bullshit to 11 thanks to their video heritage with ISOBMFF
Dylan16807 8 hours ago [-]
> Like HEIC being a license minefield and also slow as shit.
How much slower? I'm finding very conflicting numbers.
But on the timescale of "wow this still doesn't support webp" those patents will solve themselves soon.
kllrnohj 6 hours ago [-]
hardware-decoded HEIC is around 10x slower than JPEG.
software-decoded HEIC is around 100x slower than JPEG.
WebP is something like 20-50% slower than JPEG, so still solidly an order of magnitude faster than best case hardware-accelerated HEIC decoding.
phoghed 5 hours ago [-]
How slow are we talking though? 10x slower than instant and not noticeable for the average use case? Dog slow and everyone will always notice?
kllrnohj 4 hours ago [-]
well that depends on the size of the image. But a modern cell phone is shooting 50mp+, and at that size you're talking 50-200ms for a jpeg vs. a couple seconds for HEIC. Which is borderline instant-feeling vs. extremely not instant.
zahlman 8 hours ago [-]
It seems much harder to get an audience as someone complaining about technical details of codecs and their implementations, than as someone complaining about the formats (which in practical terms is always going to mean the ecosystem, or really, how broad the support base is or what the user has to do in order to deal with it).
yjftsjthsd-h 9 hours ago [-]
Perhaps it's a matter of who hits the pain point? Ugly specs make annoyed devs, licensing problems make distributors unhappy, and ecosystem issues leave users unimpressed. (With some spillover between categories, of course.)
afavour 5 hours ago [-]
Absolutely there is. If it works seamlessly for potentially endless end users and the burden is only on the singular you… yeah, it’s worth the extra effort on your part.
bawolff 5 hours ago [-]
nah, life is a trade off between developer effort and the result. There is a reason we don't hand code everything in assembly anymore - it just isn't worth it.
mahboi 2 hours ago [-]
It matters. The ecosystem by itself could be fixable. But a bad ecosystem could also be a symptom of a bad standard, for example IPv6.
pornel 6 hours ago [-]
It's still annoying that if you set quality anywhere below 100, you get half-resolution color (VP8 only has 4:2:0 chroma subsampling).
selcuka 3 hours ago [-]
The fact that there is a size limit (16,383 x 16,383 pixels) is still annoying for some (rare) use cases.
tripple6 1 hours ago [-]
True, but not that rare: some maps for my fav retro games cannot be converted from PNG to WebP because of this limitation. I can slice the images but I still prefer the original appearance and layout.
80fj0348i 2 hours ago [-]
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dspillett 8 hours ago [-]
I haven't seen much if anything saying webp itself is annoying directly, and your conclusion agrees with what I've seen. The complaining I've seen is about the tooling available (mainly from non-techies who don't care to know how to convert to another image format because, and I agree, why should they?) that once you've got a webp image file from one site the next site you try to upload it to doesn't accept them. For those of us who can convert the tooling has been there for ages, as have editors happy to load and save the format.
Though TBH I still use JPEG, PNG, or GIF, depending on use case, out of habit. The size saving for the same quality of lossy compression is not something I've found myself hankering for. It is different if you run a site that sends out millions of every image, but nothing I do is that popular and is never likely to be, and no one stuck on a really slow connection where the difference would matter to them is going to be accessing my stuff.
testing22321 10 hours ago [-]
> the conclusion is that the problem was never about webp itself but the tooling and ecosystem to handle it
That is true in life.
EVs aren’t annoying, the charging infrastructure is.
Etc
thayne 7 hours ago [-]
That isn't entirely true. EVs' smaller range, and longer "refueling" time are annoyances by themselves, and compund the annoyance of not having good charging infrastructure.
OTOH, being able to charge while you are sleeping or working is pretty convenient.
testing22321 2 hours ago [-]
BYD flash charging is as fast as a gas pump.
Alternatively, my buddies EV does 700km to a charge. I’m not driving 7 hours straight without a good break.
InsideOutSanta 17 minutes ago [-]
I also think people don't consider how EVs are actually used when they think about longer "refueling" times. It's not like you usually bring your EV to a charger and wait for it to charge. You just plug it in at home in the evening and start every day with a charged car.
I've owned EVs for a decade, and I've never actually waited for one to charge.
mahboi 2 hours ago [-]
It's annoying how the format itself, or should I say just the file extension, doesn't make it clear whether or not you have lossy compression.
azuanrb 11 hours ago [-]
> the tooling and ecosystem to handle it
That’s the whole point, though. If the tools I use don’t handle it properly, it’s annoying. Saying it’s an ecosystem problem doesn’t change that.
How long has it been now? And from what I’ve seen, even Google’s own stuff doesn’t always handle it. That’s not helping their case.
thayne 7 hours ago [-]
Well, that's a problem with the tools you are using. Tools to work with webp have existed for a long time.
al_borland 5 hours ago [-]
To not be annoying the tools don't have to just exist somewhere, they need to be ubiquitous. For example, If I'm looking to upload an image as an avatar on a website, will webp be supported? It's unlikely, even if the site itself might ultimately serve up a webp file. So then I'd have to use a tool to convert it to a more ubiquitous format before uploading it, likely doing a bunch of lossy conversion along the way. That's annoying.
colordrops 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah it's purely the fault of the tens of thousands of application devs that have been too stupid to recognize the obvious and immense benefits of webp over existing widely adopted formats /s
stackghost 11 hours ago [-]
Firefox actually silently and automatically converts images to webp in some cases when you Save As them, with no option to revert to the format you see in the DOM. It’s fucking infuriating. I hate webp because the support is so spotty.
edflsafoiewq 11 hours ago [-]
I highly doubt that is what's happening. More likely the server is serving a webp under a .png filename or something.
1e1a 11 hours ago [-]
I have observed the behavior you suspect many times.
the8472 11 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's firefox doing it? I'd guess it's some CDNs doing the conversion. Or the URL says .jpg but when you look at the mimetype sent by the server it's actually webp. Extentions are meaningless for browsers.
noisem4ker 10 hours ago [-]
It's not Firefox, it's the server. Edit and resend the request with header "Accept: image/jpeg" only and you'll most likely get a JPEG file.
tripple6 1 hours ago [-]
This would cause the downloaded file to have incorrect file extension because such services don't configure the Content-Disposition header properly, and you still may have lots of improperly named files unless you realize that the file content doesn't match its extension.
stackghost 10 hours ago [-]
That seems more likely. I still hate webp.
what 10 hours ago [-]
Does it actually request the image that it already downloaded again to save it to a file? Seems rather silly?
ender341341 8 hours ago [-]
No, the server is just sending the file named 'foo.jpg', but encoded as a webp with webp mime type, so when you save the file it defaults to the webp extension cause it ends up treating the filename as a blob of text without an expected extension for the file type.
stackghost 5 hours ago [-]
No, this is not what’s happening. Or at least not the phenomenon I am discussing.
edwinjm 11 hours ago [-]
Does Windows already display WebP files in File Explorer? :-|
Windows 10's support isn't out of the box. You need to install an explorer extension, and even then it's a bit shaky.
I personally avoid webp because of the tooling/compatibility issues.
buildsjets 6 hours ago [-]
Windows 10 support went EOL one year ago. It is an archaic operating system, so no doubt, it does not support modern technology out-of-the-box. Nevertheless, it can be modified to add such support with trivial effort.
majorchord 3 hours ago [-]
> It is an archaic operating system
Do you have a reliable source you can share which supports that claim?
80fj0348i 2 hours ago [-]
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lloydatkinson 11 hours ago [-]
It has done for some years
groundzeros2015 10 hours ago [-]
Webp does not have hardware decode and does not support progressive.
I speculate the asymmetric push is a case of it solving Google’s problem (bandwidth cost) but not the end user’s problems (battery and latency).
Aurornis 10 hours ago [-]
Hardware JPEG decode isn’t as valuable on today’s hardware. CPU decode with SIMD instructions is fast and energy efficient. It’s such a negligible part of battery usage that it’s barely worth thinking about for fast modern CPUs.
Even formats like H.264 are being dropped from some hardware decode engines because it’s so easy to do on CPUs now, as can be seen even on the Raspberry Pi 5. Many software stacks will skip hardware JPEG decode even when available because it’s extra maintenance and debugging overhead for such a little gain.
Progressive decode is a feature that is good in theory but rarely used in practice. If you’re concerning yourself with power usage and memory footprints, progressive decode goes in the opposite direction. Users also don’t like progressive decode as much as developers think they will as it’s often perceived as something being broken.
I think WebP made reasonable tradeoffs for the way images are actually used and delivered.
groundzeros2015 7 hours ago [-]
Then why do they put it on the phones? surely manufacturers would love to cut the part?
phire 6 hours ago [-]
Since webp is little more than a vp8 iframe, and most SoCs already have a hardware vp8 video decoder, the additional hardware cost to decode webp is zero. Just takes a bit of firmware development effort.
And while hardware image decoders might be dubious, hardware video decoders are very much worth it.
badatnames 9 hours ago [-]
> Even formats like H.264 are being dropped from some hardware decode engines because it’s so easy to do on CPUs now, as can be seen even on the Raspberry Pi 5
CPU decode efficiency most certainly was not the reason h.264 was dropped on the Pi
Aurornis 8 hours ago [-]
Dropping it was an option because CPU decode was sufficient.
novafunc 8 hours ago [-]
Sufficient is objective. My hardware is certainly sufficient at decoding video without performance problems, but with with CPU decode, it takes more resources and ramps up the fans. While with GPU decoding, it's near silent.
mahboi 2 hours ago [-]
Btw, even Google doesn't support webp for many of its products, like Docs/Slides.
usef- 9 hours ago [-]
It also lost much of its quality advantage over plain jpeg, given the improvements in jpeg encoders: the jpegli encoder (from google's jpegxl team) has improved plain jpeg encoding significantly.
Most photo/design apps don't seem to be using SOTA jpeg encoders, though, so I think webp looks better in comparisons like OP's than it actually is. You maintain all the ultra-fast decoding of jpg when you use a modern encoder, too.
groundzeros2015 7 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the reference.
bawolff 5 hours ago [-]
People only seem to care about progressive when talking about webp. I suspect most people don't even enable progressive decoding in formats that support it.
lxgr 10 hours ago [-]
Is hardware decoding even commonly used for still image codecs?
Aurornis 9 hours ago [-]
JPEG decoding is frequently included in systems with DSP blocks because it’s easy to add to a system that is already doing similar math for video decoding.
It’s not always used when available. It can be a lot easier and safer while being fast enough to do it on the CPU. If the operating system has an image decoder path that will handle everything for you then it might be used (Apple hardware for example) but if you have to go out of your way to implement the API, common software will favor software decoding because nobody wants to maintain code testing branches for different hardware image decode platforms.
kllrnohj 10 hours ago [-]
Only for HEIC realistically, and that only still causes it to struggle to match jpeg or webp performance anyway
dopa42365 3 hours ago [-]
HEIC is a container, not a codec. You can put an avif in there if you want to.
edent 11 hours ago [-]
Google aren't pushing WebP. Google Docs / Slides still don't support it.
I appreciate Google isn't a monolith, but that lack of consistency makes it really hard to shake the impression certain tribes within it are at war with each other.
hn_go_brrrrr 11 hours ago [-]
It's not war, it's indifference. Why should Docs give a damn what Chrome's priorities are? The only reason they would is if there were effective leadership ensuring company-wide alignment, but there is no one filling that function.
Because if they did company wide alignment, you would kill their promotion pipeline. Want harmony? Then in Google you build your own app (see N+1 chat apps) to get that feature, get promoted and dump the project on someone else.
bitpush 9 hours ago [-]
This is actually a good counter argument for 'Google is pushing X'. If they were pushing X, they'd make all their apps fall in line.
Contrast this to, say, Apple - which when decides to push something, they go all in. And that's an example of top-down decision making.
MattSayar 7 hours ago [-]
Strangely enough, Google wouldn't index my personal website when I was using webp. Everything in my Search Console showed up as "crawled but not indexed." I had multiple friends with SEO backgrounds check out my site, but everything looked configured correctly.
Switching all my images back to jpg solved it
6510 2 hours ago [-]
I think since the beginning of google I've seen a gif in image search maybe 5 times in total.
IvanK_net 8 hours ago [-]
For the past two years, I have been exporting my images in WebP instead of JPG. If I share it online or send it by an email, I am pretty sure the other side will be able to see them.
I honestly think that all phones and even professional cameras should replace JPG with WEBP, we will have like 30% smaller photos.
The DNG format (for raw photos) allows JPEG XL compression (it used to allow only JPEG in the past). I wish some country made it mandatory for cameras to let user take photos in DNG (just like USB-C is mandatory in the EU).
I am happy that HEIC from Apple did not take off (as it was proprietary, protected by patents).
jgord 9 hours ago [-]
I was amazed at how much better compression webp offered over jpg and png.
Using it in a web-browser 360 panorama viewer enabled pretty substantial latency and storage improvements.
close to 4x iirc.
ditto large "xray" style orthographic images of building scans generated from pointcloud laser scan data.
avif was even better compression for some cases, but seems to take a long time to generate, and less widespread browser support. Will look at jpeg-XL .. but Im guessing it will be a while until it has widespread support
pornel 6 hours ago [-]
It's typically 15%-30% smaller than JPEG at comparable perceptual quality. Any reduction bigger than that is just loss of quality without further compression improvement, and you could have similarly reduced file sizes by recompressing/optimizing JPEG.
In JPEG file size grows exponentially with quality, which also means that "I can't tell the difference" decrease in JPEG quality makes a huge difference in file sizes.
Grimeton 11 hours ago [-]
Avif.
Especially for animated images. Comparing webp or avif sizes to gif is easily a factor of five to ten when animated.
GavinAnderegg 10 hours ago [-]
Author here: I'm also very much looking forward to using AVIF (and also JPEG XL), but it's another tooling question. I'm really hoping that Pixelmator Pro (now owned by Apple) will support them both soon. Photoshop (which I've recently dumped) supports WebP and AVIF, but not through the "Save for Web" or "Export As" flows. Having a nice export flow where you can easily compare compression vs. quality levels is really important to me, and I suspect to many others.
Since all modern browsers support AVIF, I'd skip WEBP and just use AVIF (possibly with a fallback for JPG/PNG).
zetanor 9 hours ago [-]
When it comes to animations, is there much of a reason to use avif over webm? I suppose an avif fits into CSS and <img> without further code changes, but that's about it as far as I can think.
Starlevel004 8 hours ago [-]
An AVIF and a WebM + AV1 is basically identical file-size wise, but you can zoom in on an AVIF so for actual animated images it wins on that front.
bawolff 5 hours ago [-]
i think alpha channel is a reason, but i agree, just use webm
NelsonMinar 9 hours ago [-]
I just switched to AVIF after several years of using WebP. Main reason for me is HDR support, but the smaller encoding is nice. Just beware of lossless AVIF, that's a trap.
Dwedit 5 hours ago [-]
In GIMP, when you try to save as a "lossless" AVIF, it will add a lossy colorspace conversion step (to 8 bit YCbCr) unless you specifically specify otherwise. And lossless AVIF always loses to lossless WEBP.
seanwilson 9 hours ago [-]
https://squoosh.app/editor is a great app to compare how well an image compresses with newer formats like AVIF and WebP, compared to JPG/PNG.
It feels more practical now to have a fast loading page with large images now without too much effort. It was far too much of a burden before to have to provide fallbacks to older formats, on top of different images for different screen sizes/densities.
userbinator 10 hours ago [-]
Just as with JPEG2000, I'm still not convinced the additional complexity is worth it. There seems to be a lot of immature technologies being pushed in the past few years, when IMHO the Web should've stabilised long ago on the basics. But I guess people need things to do to keep them employed... and Big Tech needs to maintain its monopolies.
CodesInChaos 10 hours ago [-]
The old JPG/PNG choice had a big problem: JPG handles sharp edges, including text, badly. PNG produces huge photo files. Images containing a mix of both don't work well in either format.
By contrast, when using a modern format like WEBP or AVIF, a single encoder configuration produces decent looking results across a variety of input images.
pornel 5 hours ago [-]
WebP is actually two completely different compression formats developed by different teams at different times for different purposes (VP8 video codec + lossless add-on by Google).
The WebP encoder just has a switch when quality=100, then use the PNG-like format in .webp, otherwise use the JPEG-like format in .webp. WebP at quality < 100 will destroy text, sometimes worse than JPEG, because VP8 can't store color at full resolution. WebP at q=100 will blow up photo sizes by orders of magnitude, similarly to PNG.
AVIF and JPEG XL actually have ability to mix-and-match blurry and sharp compression modes within a single image.
How is it "a single encoder configuration"? WEBP has separate lossy and lossless compression modes and simply gives both the same filename extension.
bawolff 5 hours ago [-]
i thought their point was that even in lossy mode, it works acceptable for both.
anon84873628 10 hours ago [-]
At what year would you say the web should have stabilized on the basics?
userbinator 9 hours ago [-]
As in JPEG, GIF, and PNG? Early 2000s. Maybe with a subset of SWF as a (animated)/vector format instead of horribly bloated SVG.
scosman 5 hours ago [-]
I love webp. I founded one of the mid 2010's "photo backup and rediscovery" startups. Webp let us offer free unlimited photo backup at the iPhone resolution of the time (iPhone 6: 8MP). We hosted billions of photos for free, and paid for it all with a sub 1% conversion rate to $5 a month for untouched jpegs. It was profitable. We had to have a few dozen auto-scaling image conversion servers for browsers that didn't support webp, but 95% of users used our apps which supported webp, so it was fine.
I'd probably go avif/jpegxl today, but webp was ahead of it's time.
Dwedit 5 hours ago [-]
There are two different codecs both called "webp". There's the lossy VP8 codec, and the lossless codec that's completely different. Lossless WebP is so good that outside of image format support, there's no reason to use anything older (except for very specific kinds of repetitive images).
k310 2 days ago [-]
One forum I use does not embed webp links. They show up as links, period, and it's a damn waste of my time to convert. Small is beautiful unless your forum is run by two people, not having the time to update code all the time.
Many image links that work for search engines don't work for the site and I have to download and then upload to a host to get an embeddable image link.
repsilat 11 hours ago [-]
X doesn't support animated webp, slightly annoying.
rwmj 10 hours ago [-]
XPM works just fine though.
chuliomartinez 2 hours ago [-]
Let not forget you can save a canvas as webP with toBlob.
arjie 6 hours ago [-]
I use webp on my blog a lot. The software automatically converts it when I post and so on. Surprisingly small files and I've never had any trouble opening them on any platform. Big fan.
louky 11 hours ago [-]
Annoyingly Google voice doesn't support it at all, either.
I've installed a firefox extension[0] that saves any image as .JPG,.PNG, or .WEBP
The one annoying thing about WebP is that you can no longer see from the file extension whether some image is lossy or lossless.
The other annoying thing is the name, because surprisingly we use images in non-web-related contexts as well. Admittedly, PNG technically has a very similar issue, but it’s less in your face.
nananana9 7 hours ago [-]
All this, and also PNG and JPEG both sound cool when you say them out loud. Web-pee on the other hand...
tjoff 10 hours ago [-]
Why? Just skip webp altogether, an annoying footnote that caused more issues than it solved.
Go straight to jpeg xl and/or avif when the they are mature.
GavinAnderegg 10 hours ago [-]
Author here: as I wrote in the piece, I've recently dumped Photoshop for Pixelmator Pro. It doesn't currently support AVIF. Photoshop does, but not in a way that makes it easy to optimize an image for web export. JPEG XL is also exciting to me, but it's not generally available across browsers. WebP is the current best image format for my use-case, but I'm hoping others supplant it soon.
Gigachad 8 hours ago [-]
>but it's not generally available across browsers.
Note that this is changing rapidly. Safari ships JXL, Chrome did a few days ago, and Firefox will in the next few days. Once this flows through to all the chromium based browsers we will see pretty much 100% support on the web.
lofaszvanitt 3 hours ago [-]
mozjpeg turbo, nananananana :D works, small, great quality, nobody cares about the rest
I remember moving on to PNG when that was implemented in most browsers and suddenly you could do gradients that end in transparency...
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1852467/alpha-transparen...
Ecosystem being slow to adopt it is something that can be fixed or improved, but also more importantly (given jpegxl & avif comparisons) are things that will impact any new image format.
Meanwhile annoyances of the codec tend to be things that are dramatically harder to deal with. Like HEIC being a license minefield and also slow as shit. Or that many of these newer image codecs do not have ways to work with them in a memory efficient manner like jpeg does (see eg libjpeg-turbo's sample size & skip scanline options). Or WebP insisted on being in a RIFF container for... uh... absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever afaict. Fortunately RIFF is so trivial that this overhead doesn't actually matter in practice, but then HEIC & AVIF dials up the annoying container bullshit to 11 thanks to their video heritage with ISOBMFF
How much slower? I'm finding very conflicting numbers.
But on the timescale of "wow this still doesn't support webp" those patents will solve themselves soon.
software-decoded HEIC is around 100x slower than JPEG.
WebP is something like 20-50% slower than JPEG, so still solidly an order of magnitude faster than best case hardware-accelerated HEIC decoding.
Though TBH I still use JPEG, PNG, or GIF, depending on use case, out of habit. The size saving for the same quality of lossy compression is not something I've found myself hankering for. It is different if you run a site that sends out millions of every image, but nothing I do is that popular and is never likely to be, and no one stuck on a really slow connection where the difference would matter to them is going to be accessing my stuff.
That is true in life.
EVs aren’t annoying, the charging infrastructure is.
Etc
OTOH, being able to charge while you are sleeping or working is pretty convenient.
Alternatively, my buddies EV does 700km to a charge. I’m not driving 7 hours straight without a good break.
I've owned EVs for a decade, and I've never actually waited for one to charge.
That’s the whole point, though. If the tools I use don’t handle it properly, it’s annoying. Saying it’s an ecosystem problem doesn’t change that.
How long has it been now? And from what I’ve seen, even Google’s own stuff doesn’t always handle it. That’s not helping their case.
I personally avoid webp because of the tooling/compatibility issues.
Do you have a reliable source you can share which supports that claim?
I speculate the asymmetric push is a case of it solving Google’s problem (bandwidth cost) but not the end user’s problems (battery and latency).
Even formats like H.264 are being dropped from some hardware decode engines because it’s so easy to do on CPUs now, as can be seen even on the Raspberry Pi 5. Many software stacks will skip hardware JPEG decode even when available because it’s extra maintenance and debugging overhead for such a little gain.
Progressive decode is a feature that is good in theory but rarely used in practice. If you’re concerning yourself with power usage and memory footprints, progressive decode goes in the opposite direction. Users also don’t like progressive decode as much as developers think they will as it’s often perceived as something being broken.
I think WebP made reasonable tradeoffs for the way images are actually used and delivered.
And while hardware image decoders might be dubious, hardware video decoders are very much worth it.
CPU decode efficiency most certainly was not the reason h.264 was dropped on the Pi
Most photo/design apps don't seem to be using SOTA jpeg encoders, though, so I think webp looks better in comparisons like OP's than it actually is. You maintain all the ultra-fast decoding of jpg when you use a modern encoder, too.
It’s not always used when available. It can be a lot easier and safer while being fast enough to do it on the CPU. If the operating system has an image decoder path that will handle everything for you then it might be used (Apple hardware for example) but if you have to go out of your way to implement the API, common software will favor software decoding because nobody wants to maintain code testing branches for different hardware image decode platforms.
I appreciate Google isn't a monolith, but that lack of consistency makes it really hard to shake the impression certain tribes within it are at war with each other.
https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...
Contrast this to, say, Apple - which when decides to push something, they go all in. And that's an example of top-down decision making.
Switching all my images back to jpg solved it
I honestly think that all phones and even professional cameras should replace JPG with WEBP, we will have like 30% smaller photos.
The DNG format (for raw photos) allows JPEG XL compression (it used to allow only JPEG in the past). I wish some country made it mandatory for cameras to let user take photos in DNG (just like USB-C is mandatory in the EU).
I am happy that HEIC from Apple did not take off (as it was proprietary, protected by patents).
Using it in a web-browser 360 panorama viewer enabled pretty substantial latency and storage improvements.
close to 4x iirc.
ditto large "xray" style orthographic images of building scans generated from pointcloud laser scan data.
avif was even better compression for some cases, but seems to take a long time to generate, and less widespread browser support. Will look at jpeg-XL .. but Im guessing it will be a while until it has widespread support
In JPEG file size grows exponentially with quality, which also means that "I can't tell the difference" decrease in JPEG quality makes a huge difference in file sizes.
Especially for animated images. Comparing webp or avif sizes to gif is easily a factor of five to ten when animated.
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/jpeg-xl-in-chrome
It feels more practical now to have a fast loading page with large images now without too much effort. It was far too much of a burden before to have to provide fallbacks to older formats, on top of different images for different screen sizes/densities.
By contrast, when using a modern format like WEBP or AVIF, a single encoder configuration produces decent looking results across a variety of input images.
The WebP encoder just has a switch when quality=100, then use the PNG-like format in .webp, otherwise use the JPEG-like format in .webp. WebP at quality < 100 will destroy text, sometimes worse than JPEG, because VP8 can't store color at full resolution. WebP at q=100 will blow up photo sizes by orders of magnitude, similarly to PNG.
AVIF and JPEG XL actually have ability to mix-and-match blurry and sharp compression modes within a single image.
I'd probably go avif/jpegxl today, but webp was ahead of it's time.
Many image links that work for search engines don't work for the site and I have to download and then upload to a host to get an embeddable image link.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/siat/
The other annoying thing is the name, because surprisingly we use images in non-web-related contexts as well. Admittedly, PNG technically has a very similar issue, but it’s less in your face.
Go straight to jpeg xl and/or avif when the they are mature.
Note that this is changing rapidly. Safari ships JXL, Chrome did a few days ago, and Firefox will in the next few days. Once this flows through to all the chromium based browsers we will see pretty much 100% support on the web.