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.

  • krashmo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1504·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Kichae@kbin.social
      502·
      1 year ago

      Make default programs support JPEG XL and the problem goes away, too, all with less Google.

        • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldEnglish
          192·
          1 year ago

          I have no idea what you mean. Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta be getting back to my job at Titanic Boat Repair.

        • lemme_at_it@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • amanaftermidnight@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          It’s the early 00s and they’ve just been recently freed from the shackles of 8.3 file names, they’re going ham on those file extensions.

      • genoxidedev1@kbin.social
        10·
        1 year ago

        Yes PLEASE, JXL is just way superior and it’s got the benefit of already having JPEG in its name which should ease widespread adoption. I never liked webp and it can seriously get lost.

      • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
        2·
        1 year ago

        I highly doubt they use webp to further their ambitions in web-supperiority. They just wanted something where they don’t have to pay license fees.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
        611·
        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
          142·
          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.worldOP
            6·
            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.

              • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
                7·
                1 year ago

                I don’t know the technical aspects of webp, but as long as it’s just another image format, any application that works with images should be able to just support it with an import/export filter. Again, XnView supports 500 formats, so it can’t be impossible.

                And all my apps support webp so well, I never realized there could be a problem with it except when I heard that Windows is starting to support it and I realised that oh yea, them being slow again.

                Again it’s not just webp, there’s been a ton of attempts to bring better image formats, all the way back to jpeg2000. Some people just don’t want to do any amount of work beyond the basics.

                We’ve had the same problem with sound. Lots of good formats in the last 20 years - ogg, flac, aac - yet you can still find things that only play mp3, often only up to a certain bitrate. That’s not a good reason why everyone should forever stick only to mp3.

                Yet there’s never been a problem with adopting new video formats, and that stuff is way harder to implement, often requiring hardware support to be feasible. We’re not sticking to 30 years old Real Media and QuickTime. Images deserve better too.

        • elephantium@lemmy.world
          4·
          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.

          • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
            1·
            1 year ago

            Haha welcome to my another session of bitching about ancient media formats.

            Anyway I’ll just recommend XnView to you too. 500 supported image formats, so you can imagine why I get so pissy when people try to convince me that jpg and gif forevaaaa and that webp or whatever is difficult to implement. Maybe give LWF (Lura Wave Format) a shot, that stuff has been around for 20+ years too and can blow jpg out of the water.

            Oh XnView can do screenshots and cropping and stuff too. A free program that’s been around for 25 years, and for DOS before that. And yet the mainstream sticks to whatever nonsense is the default. It’s heartbreaking.

            • elephantium@lemmy.world
              1·
              1 year ago

              Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check it out.

              Mostly what I’m looking for is fire-and-forget screenshots. I’ll hit alt-printscreen to capture something during the between-turn processing, then go back and crop it and upload it later along with everything else. Tweaking that to a new hotkey -> select the area to screenshot would be fine, but I still want it to automatically save the screenshot in a folder. That was the “killer feature” of the screenie helper I’ve been using for ages.

              • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
                1·
                1 year ago

                Ok I’m not sure if XnView can automatically save a screenshot to a file (I don’t have a PC with me), but there are certainly lots of tools that can help with that too.

        • Matriks404@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.worldEnglish
      91·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • cry@lemmy.mlEnglish
        10·
        1 year ago

        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)

      • Rozaŭtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        But it took a while for it, and many people are probably running old software without the updates, so at this point the hate has cemented.