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0 pointshandsclean2y ago0 comments

Honest question: what’s so awful about WEBP? Though it’s worse than the gen arriving now, it’s better than or the same as the one before it for the use cases it supports, and free and open. I get the impression people associate it with brokenness and low quality, but the brokenness is just a lack of support, and the quality a creator choice. Maybe its original sin was not trying to be suitable for original data, leading to the low quality association and making support less desirable outside of the web, but if that’s the case then AVIF is in the same boat.

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lonjil2y ago

Lossy WebP has some crappy limitations. For example, it's limited to 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, which makes it unsuitable for high quality images. Hell, even if you restrict yourself to 420 JPEG, JPEG still comes out as having a higher quality ceiling than WebP. And yes, it does beat MozJPEG and libjpeg-turbo in file size sometimes, but newer JPEG encoders like jpegli crush WebP in size completely across the entire quality spectrum.

archerx2y ago

I associate it with google, and I have associated google with bad and untrustworthy. Also google's hostility towards jpeg xl makes me even more apprehensive of their format and the way they tried to push it so hard.

Also jpeg XL is just much better than webp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc2DvJpXh-A

JyrkiAlakuijala2y ago

Google is not hostile to JPEG XL.

Google Research develops and maintains JPEG XL, currently main focus on improving streaming encoding -- to use much less memory during the encoding process.

Google Chrome added and then removed experimental support of JPEG XL from Chrome. This has caused discussion in the related bugs.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=145180... https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...

ksec2y ago

It is not really awful. It is just way over hyped, over promised and under delivered. WebP was better than standard JPEG. But JPEG also improved via many other encoders such as MozJPEG. And it wasn't obvious what the advantage were, or it was so little it really shouldn't be included as a standard feature. Mozilla made their case back then with many testing and data point.

spider-mario2y ago

> WebP was better than standard JPEG.

Feature-wise, maybe (transparency, animation). Compression-wise, not really (better at low qualities because the artifacts are somewhat less objectionable than JPEG’s, but worse at high qualities).

Lossless WebP (practically a separate codec) is nice though, albeit 8-bit only.

izacus2y ago

Transparency was a massive advantage to the point it became default compressed format for e.g. Android apps.

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