- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
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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Nothing to do with users. Operating systems don’t support it in their default file managers and viewers.
I can view webp easily on both windows and Linux, but I don’t use the default windows photo viewer because it started sucking a few years ago. I don’t even know what I use
Irfanview perhaps?
Nah it’s something with a nicer interface that’s windows only I think, i-view maybe
Imageglass
What operating systems?
Will the real MrPoopyButthole please stand up?
Most do. But i wouldn’t be surprised if Windows Photo Viewer didn’t. In this case, please install a sane third party alternative, like with most Windows tools.
Btw, isn’t webp opened in the browser by default?
In Chrome it does.
Make default programs support opening webp files and the problem goes away. Until that happens users have every reason to convert files from a format that is a pain in the ass to open.
Make default programs support JPEG XL and the problem goes away, too, all with less Google.
Naming a compression scheme “XL” seems like a bad choice.
Bad name choices abound among software creators. It’s almost a default behaviour, especially in smaller teams or single developer situations. Like the guy who made “crap cleaner” for for his own use; he’d later share it with friends, by the time he released it to the public he was forced to rename it ccleaner, it is still going to this day as one of the most downloaded windows software (2.5 billion downloads). He could have just given it a decent name in the beginning - for free. There is also GIMP, whose name simply keeps it out of serious use, unless you already know it’s capabilities.
I have no idea what you mean. Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta be getting back to my job at Titanic Boat Repair.
It’s the early 00s and they’ve just been recently freed from the shackles of 8.3 file names, they’re going ham on those file extensions.
Yes PLEASE, JXL is just way superior and it’s got the benefit of already having JPEG in its name which should ease widespread adoption. I never liked webp and it can seriously get lost.
I highly doubt they use webp to further their ambitions in web-supperiority. They just wanted something where they don’t have to pay license fees.
This. No programs I routinely use images for support it.
Can you list at least a few? Everyone’s like “noooo my apps don’t support it” but nobody says what apps, what are y’all afraid to admit that you use MS Paint or what?
MSPaint literally opens WebP files, or at least it does in the most recent Windows 10 version (It doesn’t support saving them for some reason though).
But I also don’t believe that most apps don’t use it, the only app on my system that doesn’t support WebP is the default Windows app, which is horrible anyway.
But generally unless you use some very outdated software it should open webps just fine.
I use my trusty Paint Shop Pro 7 and Paint Tool SAI, neither of which support it.
I use MS paint on a regular basis! I play Civ succession games, so I take some screenshots of the game during my turns. I use Paint to crop them.
The helper utility I’ve been using can save as bmp, png, gif, or jpg.
The built-in Windows snipping tool can save as png, gif, jpg, or mht (which ends up being bmp under the hood).
Hmm, it might just be time to find a replacement tool.
Haha welcome to my another session of bitching about ancient media formats.
Anyway I’ll just recommend XnView to you too. 500 supported image formats, so you can imagine why I get so pissy when people try to convince me that jpg and gif forevaaaa and that webp or whatever is difficult to implement. Maybe give LWF (Lura Wave Format) a shot, that stuff has been around for 20+ years too and can blow jpg out of the water.
Oh XnView can do screenshots and cropping and stuff too. A free program that’s been around for 25 years, and for DOS before that. And yet the mainstream sticks to whatever nonsense is the default. It’s heartbreaking.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check it out.
Mostly what I’m looking for is fire-and-forget screenshots. I’ll hit alt-printscreen to capture something during the between-turn processing, then go back and crop it and upload it later along with everything else. Tweaking that to a new hotkey -> select the area to screenshot would be fine, but I still want it to automatically save the screenshot in a folder. That was the “killer feature” of the screenie helper I’ve been using for ages.
Ok I’m not sure if XnView can automatically save a screenshot to a file (I don’t have a PC with me), but there are certainly lots of tools that can help with that too.
Gitlab won’t take a webp as a profile picture.
They do.
Photos in windows supports it. Preview on Mac OS/photos on iOS supports it. I assume anything android would support it as well. Plus every web browser supports it.
But it took a while for it, and many people are probably running old software without the updates, so at this point the hate has cemented.
Photos in windows supports it
It does? Ive tried to use photos to open it before. Its impossible to associate the file with Photos intuitively. I am about to start directly editing my registry to see if i can do it there. (Windows 10, very custom so that might be the issue, I will try on a vanilla copy)
Lemmy converts all uploads to webp.
Also the reason people don’t like it is because gallery apps and the like are behind the times, so you can’t just, open webps, sometimes.
Lemmy converts all uploads to webp.
Does it? I downloaded this post from Liftoff, it’s a jpg.
At least my instance does. You’re right, this post is hosted on .world and is a jpg.
I checked https://sopuli.xyz/ local and saw a bunch of jpeg and png, no webp?
And Discord doesn’t like webp as format for custom emotes. That’s the main reason I’ve been converting them to png or gif
Lack of good integrated support in Windows and Mac, as well as no native way to convert from webp means it is good when it is good, but infuriating when it is bad. If you just need something to work, you don’t want to fight with converting image formats, you just want to move on.
I supported the idea of webp, still do, but it’s 100% less widely supported on legacy software, and the OS does nothing to interpret for those software packages.
it’s a compressed image format you shouldn’t be converting between them
I should be able to convert whatever I want.
Conversion is better than useless. I was caught out by it recently. I was sent an image (for a product return). Unfortunately the upload process wouldn’t even see webp files.
Obviously, the best solution is to extend support as widely as possible as quickly as possible. As an interim we also need to be able to use those files, despite the target software not supporting them.
I’m pretty sure you can open a webp in mspaint and save it as a png. If not you definitely can with paint.net
That doesn’t help when your using an android phone at the time. It’s doable, but cumbersome.
Looks like webp worked in android 4… Lossless was added in 10 so maybe that’s what doesn’t always work?
Confession time: I didn’t realise webp was an image format - whenever searches came up with it, I assumed it was some shenanigans designed to prevent me stealing it … so I, um, took a screenshot of it,
In my defence, Windows doesn’t classify them as image files (rather as Internet Edge HTML Documents), and IrfanView32 (which you can tell is a great app 'cos its got ‘32’ in its name) doesn’t support them. I’ve since realised that GIMP and MS Paint do open them though.
Well, at least you now know, so that’s a few less png screenshots of photos in existence.
I remember IrfanView well, is that no longer developed? I’ve always preferred XnView which still exists and with its support for 500 image formats, ya’ll never never have a problem opening anything that has valid image data in it.
Jpeg XL!
The take-home message here is definitely that WebP is secretly evil :P
From my point of view, gif is evil!
(Seriously, I have a real light-axe to grind when it comes to gif. I can live with jpeg, but the 80MB 10-second crappy gifs people keep sharing, make me lose my Jedi patience.)
The major software companies will decide your fate.
Please stop running bloated websites with megabytes of dependencies on my chromebook or Walmart PC with a Intel Celeron that is 6 times slower yes I benchmarked them than my phone then maybe I would consider webp.
All in all though seriously; the only good thing about webp and the only way to get good performance out of it is to make your own site on something like Neo Cities from hand crafted html5, css and JavaScript and not load bloated dependencies.
Plus in general people would rather use png because it can be viewed on everything and some websites and services outright refuse to support webp so why not use png or jpg-xl?
Plus in general people would rather use png because it can be viewed on everything and some websites and services outright refuse to support webp so why not use png or jpg-xl?
Because PNG files are lossless and way higher quality than you need for sharing a meme over Discord. Using the extra 3MB isn’t worth it unless you can’t avoid it. And Jpeg XL is not supported by any browser right now and Chromium removed support entirely. Thus it’s most likely dead in the water, sadly. Your only other option for most things is regular old jpeg, which has all the old problems like lacking transparency.
Chromium removed support entirely.
Wow, fuck Google.
I hope AVIF gets a different fate. Problem is mostly that not every app opens it. I made my screenshots in AVIF for a while but had to stop doing it because not everybody could open the images properly…
That looks like a nice format
I can’t decide which I like more, AVIF or JXL. If you’d have asked me last month I would have said AVIF, but as I’m reading more about JXL I’m liking it a lot!
why is webp always so problematic?
Because Google made it