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.
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.
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.
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?
How about a major one? Discord.
If you send any other image or gif, discord will show the image inline. Webp you have to download.
Want another one? Ifranview. An extremely common image viewer that has hyper customization and widespread support.
Want another one? OBS. Because that’s what you need when streaming. Another hoop to jump through in converting the image.
Want another one? Windows. They classify it as html and don’t display image data. Just left as white thumbnails.
Want another one? Photopea. Free online photoshop that you can access through web browser.
Want me to stop being bitchy towards you? Set an example and knock it off yourself.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Looks like maybe only the photos app in Windows 11? My Windows 10 VM is pretty out of date but they could have updated it by now. But who knows with Microsoft.
According to wikipedia almost everyone jumped on board in about 2020.
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
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
