Webp the Bane of Internet – worldbuilding.site

I absolutely despise webp. Nobody wants it. Nobody can work with it. Chrome just tries to spread it’s own stupid format which so many standard image editors like Photoshop reject out of hand. And still, because we use chrome, we always have to save images as webp nowadays. -.-

WebP is bad because it increases decoding time for the user and due to the complexity of the format it is more prone to color errors. JPEG is restricted to 8-bit per channel which makes it color stable accross screens. All images on Amazon’s site are JPEG because of this.

The problem is that many webps are actually jpegs re-encoded. So, you get crappy quality with artifacts from both formats. Most webps are actually converted jpegs. Webp is a web format and in order to reduce size many sites reconvert jpegs to webp.

I know that digital archivists still use TIFF for these reasons. I didn’t know that Targa (TGA) was still in use.
WebP and JXL both have lossless profiles. Something that JPG does not have. A lossless WebP is also substantially smaller than a PNG.
For the long term storage use case, I agree that simplicity and other ways to prevent ‘bit rot’ matters more.

Webp is hard to pronounce and has a too long name.

AVIF and JPEG XL are designed to supersede Webp. AVIF competes with JPEG XL which has similar compression quality and is generally seen as much more feature-rich than AVIF.

JXL can losslessly recompress old JPEGs by ~20%, creating a nice transition path to save space for the billions of JPEGs already out there.

JPEG XL was always superior to AVIF and is older. The real question is why didn’t it pick up ?

No format ever goes away. We are still using GIF from 1987, even when we have superior PNG/MNG. I still see TIFF, TGA, BMP, PPM, etc.

To be honest, who actually cares some hundreds kilobytes in 2022.

Damn I never knew it was an actual image format like Jpg or Png. I thought it was a way to stop you downloading a copyrighted image. I assumed “Webp” stood for “Webpage” and just linked you to the original photo.

You can rename it, but you’re not changing the file format. This is a common misconception and I think Windows is to blame for it, for the bad UX in their file manager. Renaming a file does nothing more than, well, rename it. Converting a file from webp to jpg changes the entire file contents and will also change the size, the Windows Explorer can’t do that.

I HATE .webp FORMAT