this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
339 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
59287 readers
5186 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's a better format than JPEG, GIF, or PNG, while doing the jobs of all of those, but better (in most cases), and is an open format. It also has wide compatibility nowadays. The only major downside is a lot of social media services don't even think about it being a potential format due to a lack of awareness/wide usage, leading to a degraded experience when someone shares a WebP somewhere (lack of auto-embedding as an example). I suspect this is why it gets a lot of hate here, which is unfortunate because it's not at all the fault of the format.
AVIF (based on AV1) is the up-and-coming format that beats WebP in most cases now, but support isn't quite there yet (mostly due to Apple), and it has the same problems for social media as WebP. However, it doesn't have any true lossless mode AFAIK. HEIF (based on HEVC) is also good, but is heavily patent-encumbered and not as open. JPEG-XL is dope and potentially even better in some aspects, but has very poor support across the board.
one important tidbit in this whole situation that sheds a lot of light on where and why is adopted: webp is Google's horse, jpegxl is adobe's horse. that's why jpegxl has poor web support, and why webp pisses off designers.
It doesn't piss off designers, but we're pissed at Adobe for making us search for and download plugins to support it.
Seriously, fuck Adobe.
eh, it's just two stubborn corporate entities trying to throw their weight around. the only reason adobe looks bad here is because Google is winning. they both stubbornly refuse to allow the other's standard on their platforms.
jpegxl is the better format, without a doubt, but adobe is a fool if they think they can strongarm Google.
to me, adobe is being foolish, but they're both equally being evil.
Google doesn't really compete in the professional space, though. Adobe does, and we need these tools for a huge number of reasons. When I first started seeing webp's, I kept trying to use them in projects and was unable. I was passing them through online converters for a little bit before realizing there was a plugin.
I don't care which one wins, or which one is more heavily adopted... I just want to see ALL of those in my tools I need for my job.
I know I get annoyed by webp because Telegram processes it as a sticker instead of a normal image. That's my only gripe with it, but like you said that's more Telegram than the actual format.
AVIF only beats WebP for heavily compressed images and it doesn't beat it by much.
If you want high quality images - then WebP is way better than AVIF. And if you want a lossless image then AVIF is totally useless. Lossless AVIF files are often 2x or 3x larger than an uncompressed image. WTF.
Lossless WebP images can be as good as a quarter the size of an uncompressed source.
And as bandwidth improves and images don't really get much bigger (we're already at the limit of human visual perception for reasonable file sizes) for me that makes WebP a better compression algorithm than AVIF.
IDK what you mean by lack of auto-embedding, the support for it has been pretty fantastic from the start. I literally learned about it because I was looking though supported formats for a library, and it's been in the list ever since