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.

  • @WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOPM
    6•1 year ago

    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?

    • @Jase@lemmy.world
      5•1 year ago

      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.

      • @WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOPM
        1•1 year ago

        See, that’s fair. I don’t know why people can’t say so. It’s time to name and shame companies that can’t keep up with the times.

        I’m not saying webp is the be-all end-all, but goddamn we need to start using more modern compression for things. Especially gif, which is a fucking horrible format for what people use it today.

        I still remember when Internet Explorer wouldn’t support png. It takes pressure to get crappy companies to move their ass.

        In regards to both Windows and IrfanView, there’s a reason why I’ve been using XnView for 25 years now, with its 500 supported image formats, including webp of course.

        • @Jase@lemmy.world
          1•1 year ago

          Changing one image viewer unfortunately doesn’t change the list of reasons that I have to utterly avoid WebP.

          You say naming and shaming but so many companies don’t use it I can only come to the conclusion it’s because WebP is just fucking garbage behind the scenes. That it’s a nightmare to implement or maintain in someway. Tech gets adopted because of simplicity and ease of use. If WebP isn’t being used it’s because it’s less easy to put into place than it is for other extensions.

    • @elephantium@lemmy.world
      1•1 year ago

      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.