• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

GAF, what do we think of .webp format?

Thoughts on .webp?


  • Total voters
    27
  • Poll closed .

Pejo

Member
First of all, what is .webp?

From wikipedia:
WebP is a raster graphics file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression,[8] as well as animation and alpha transparency.

Google announced the WebP format in September 2010, and released the first stable version of its supporting library in April 2018.

I suppose its nice that its compression provides better/similar quality to .png and .jpg at smaller file sizes, and it's also nice that it supports transparency and animation.

HOWEVER.

It also isn't universally supported, most notably for embedding/uploading images *cough* GAF *cough* and even in Windows operating systems' default "photos" app, depending on your current version.

It appears that Google has been trying to force this format for a while now, and certain CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) will automatically serve you .webps instead of .jpgs and .pngs despite the old file extension being listed on the sites. Most notably, Akamai CDNs have been using this funcitonality for a while now.

You can see examples of this happening on literally any wikia page.
From the URL of this image of Link:
8onXDdj.jpg


Right clicking the image, going to "Save image as...":
WOqVxEF.jpg


Also of note, if you just rename and select a different filetype in this step, it still encodes/compresses the image as a .webp and will still not be uploadable on sites such as *cough* GAF *cough*, even though it has a .jpg/.png file extension.

It's more of an annoyance to me than anything. If the format becomes universally accepted and usable everywhere, I think it will be less of an issue. I have downloaded a Chromium-based browser extension in the meantime that allows me to specify the format of the image while saving, but it's also an extra step to use that I didn't really want to have to deal with.

Anyways, what do you guys think of this?
 

Mistake

Member
Extremely annoying. It seems that ios saves them as png though, so that's probably why I don't usually notice. On my laptop I always have to trash the image or convert it myself for one reason or another
 
Last edited:
It sucks. Grab something from the web in webp and it won’t open in most image editors and can’t be used directly for a lot of other purposes.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I'll download one of these stupid files and then find out I can't upload it because of the format.
 
I hate it. I suppose it might be good for displaying images in a website due to file size so pages load quicker/use less data of saving server storage space. But it sucks. If I get a webp image I'll convert it straight away.
 
Last edited:

nkarafo

Member
It pisses me off. One of the things people made to make the internet less useful.

Thankfully, Firefox has a fast and easy way to screenshot those things and convert them before they get saved in your PC.
 

kurisu_1974

is on perm warning for being a low level troll
If it doesn't allow me to post retarded animated pictures in Teams at work I don't care about it.
 

Hudo

Member
Not a fan. It's too google-centric and not supported well enough for important web applications. Google will kill it off at some point anyway.
This is essentially how I feel about it as well. Still pissed that Google decided to dislike JPEG XL and subsequently support and adoption for it is stalling...
 

sono

Gold Member
If I save it I cant zoom in to the
juicy
area I want to examine for educational purposes with the regular tool I have to hand
 

Wildebeest

Member
Good old Jiff and Ping are easier to pronounce, but I would say webp is somehow less annoying than jpeg. Microsoft not supporting it seems like spite more than anything.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom