I don’t know what a .webp file is but I don’t like it. They’re like a filthy prank version of the image/gif you’re looking for. They make you jump through all these hoops to find the original versions of the files that you can actually do anything with.

Edit: honestly I assumed it had something to do with Google protecting themselves from image piracy shit

  • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de
    4·
    2 years ago

    Webp is a fairly standard if rather new image format, that are frequently used by websites due to their small file size. To further cut bandwidth costs and loading time, websites will often only include a tiny webp of an image until you click to expand or something like that, so that they don’t have to serve a massive image if the user will only even see a thumbnail sized preview. However, this does break the “save image” button as if you try to download the thumbnail, say from google images.

    Completely separately, some scummy sites will make you sign up for an account or something to download a full size image, and the only advice I have here is that it is almost always faster to find another site with the image then jump though the hoops.

  • dezmd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    2 years ago

    Just a way for Google to influence and force change on end users away from previously accepted standards, a strategy that allows them to further obfuscate attempts to DRM all media to make sure only authorized parties can play in the sandbox. Don’t worry, they’re trying to move the entire browser that way as well. Mandatory ads and mandatory DRM that can scan your cache and local files for possible violations are coming right goddamn behind it all.

    WEBP is effectively a container format warped into a media compression format, it’s strength that’s actively exploited is obviously in saving a little bandwidth by (further) compressing and serving smaller sized cached webp files of existing jpg/png/gif/etc files to end users.

    PNG (and JPG for that matter) has worked just fine for static image files for decades, but that was a community project created to work around the patent encumbrance of GIF so there’s not money to be made and nothing to embrace/extend/extinguish by the big patent happy corps by allowing it to retain status as a ‘standard’ in active use. Bandwidth, processing power, and storage have come a long way since PNG started giving us better quality than JPG’s inconsistent compression artifacts.

    /waves old man cane around in the air in a threatening manner

  • Kabe@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 years ago

    The format actually has a lot of benefits - it supports transparency, animation, and compresses very efficiently. So it could theoretically replace GIF, JPG, and PNG in one fell swoop.

    The downsides are that many apps don’t currently support it and that it’s owned by Google.

    Personally I use webp for images that are not intended to share (e.g. banners and images on my blog), but stick to JPG/PNG for sending to other people.

    • Dark Arc@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 years ago

      and that it’s owned by Google.

      I mean yes, but it’s patent irrevocably royalty free (so long as you don’t sue people claiming WebM/P as your own/partially your own work), so it’s effectively owned by the public.

      Google hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer implementations of the WebM Specifications, where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by implementation of the WebM Specifications. If You or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any implementation of the WebM Specifications constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any rights granted to You under the License for the WebM Specifications shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed. “WebM Specifications” means the specifications to the WebM codecs as embodied in the source code to the WebM codecs or any written description of such specifications, in either case as distributed by Google.

      Source: https://www.webmproject.org/license/bitstream/

      (But Dark, that’s WebM not WebP! – they share the same license: https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/g/webp-discuss/c/W4_j7Tlofv8)

  • RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 years ago

    It’s just a new picture format that is arguably better than jpeg in many scenarios. It has been around for many years. Windows just refuses to do file associations correctly, so people hate it for no reason.

  • BeardedPip@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 years ago

    Google being fucking Google.

    I downloaded the Save By Type extension because it was impossible to some of my schoolwork this term due to the webp BS.

    • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de
      31·
      2 years ago

      Dont blame google, it is Mucrisoft’s fault for refusing to support them under default windows. The format itself is in many ways superior to both PNG and JPEG.

      • BeardedPip@lemmy.world
        11·
        2 years ago

        If one company is pushing something (google) and several others have trouble with it (MS, Apple, Adobe) then maybe the pusher is to blame for issues?

        • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de
          22·
          2 years ago

          Gimp, who’s developmental team consists of a bunch of volunteers supports it, the reasons those companies don’t support is is either because they don’t care about users (Adobe), or because they are pushing their own, proprietary format. (Apple) Microsoft directly competes with Google in the cloud ecosystem space and therefore wants to make using Google as painful as possible. (See microsoft making it a huge pain to switch the default browser to chrome)

          • BeardedPip@lemmy.world
            11·
            2 years ago

            See microsoft making it a huge pain to switch the default browser to chrome

            Are you high? Chrome dominates the browser market. This is such a blatantly terrible argument.

  • DrQuint@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 years ago

    You only dislike it because whatever bad app you’re using to share them on doesn’t support them.

    Stop being the gullible fool and start hating the apps not the file format.

    Edit: I also spot your .gif favouritism in there. .gif is an archaic and wasteful format, and asking for it is the same as looking at your car and whining that the fuel has no lead.

    • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 years ago

      The guy clearly isn’t familiar with a lot of image formats and is trying to find out about them by asking, a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and in a special community called no stupid questions, no less.

      You don’t need to call anyone a gullible fool and furthermore you’ve not actually helped to answer the question “what is webp”, at all. What are you trying to achieve with this pointless aggression? If you wanted one less “gullible fool” you’d have to answer the question and educate, at best you’ve sown confusion.

      • KoboldOfArtifice@ttrpg.network
        1·
        2 years ago

        Neither have they the choice of what format others use. The point here was that the apps are to blame for not supporting the format, not the format for not being supported. It’s a common format nowadays.

      • ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi
        0·
        2 years ago

        Everytime a post gets displayed on a screen, it got transferred over a dozen routers, parsed by a network card, decoded byte by byte to get each pixel’s color and then displayed on screen

        Transferring and decoding all that extra data on millions of computers isn’t free

        When you make an instagram post that gets seen by millions of people it’s absolutely not negligible to use webp vs a jpg and choosing one over the other because you’re just… used to the extension? is downright getting unacceptable if you are at least a lil tech savvy

        People need to start using newer file format for real now. It’s been 20 years

      • ram@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        > The fact that GIF is still a thing in 2023 is baffling

        As opposed to what widely supported animated image format?

          • ram@lemmy.world
            01·
            2 years ago

            Of all the formats you mentioned these are supported on popular platforms:

            • Twitter: gif
            • Discord: gif
            • Mastodon: gif
            • Reddit: gif, apng
            • Tumblr: gif, webp
            • Lemmy: gif, apng, webp

            That’s why gifs are still a thing.

            • blujan@sopuli.xyz
              1·
              2 years ago

              This is circular reasoning. They are wondering why gif is still a thing precisely because it’s so supported while other formats that are better aren’t and you are answering that it is because it’s supported while other formats aren’t.

              • bouh@lemmy.world
                01·
                2 years ago

                It’s called an industry standard. We’re using the same bolting in mechanic for ages. Only in computer science do things have to change every year…

  • Polar@lemmy.ca
    1·
    2 years ago

    You would like it if you had slow internet, or you hosted a website.

    My website turned 5MB images into 100KB images using webp. My website now loads instantly, saves you bandwidth, and me costs!

      • 9point6@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        Yep! Not least of all, GIF & JPEG are over 30 year old formats and WebP is about a decade old. So there’s at least 20 years of advancement there

        • TheOPtimal@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          3·
          2 years ago

          JPEG-XL has been out for three years, and is better and more efficient than any other image format on the market. Google just has been insisting on keeping them off the web because they want to push WebP instead.

            • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
              1·
              2 years ago

              I think webp has already “won”, because google refuses to have jxl support in chrome, the web browser most of the people use.

              Apart from that, if I’ll have a website I’ll aim to support jxl and the old formats, but webp not even by mistake.
              Why? I think this is yet another thing with which google wants to be everywhere for this or that reason and I’m fed up with that.

        • bouh@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 years ago

          That means absolutely nothing. We went to the moon with hardware that had ram in kilobytes. Today you need a supercomputer from the 70s to run the add of a Web page.

          Progress is not linear. C is still used everywhere while some other languages didn’t live a tenth of its age. New is not always better.

          • 9point6@lemmy.world
            0·
            2 years ago

            Yeah for sure, new is not always better.

            Though for compressed media file formats, that pretty much has been the correlation for a while (though obviously there’s many different conflicting qualities that can make a file format “good” for various purposes)

            Take video for example: MPEG2 came along and MPEG quickly became uncommon within a couple of years. MPEG4 displaced MPEG2 due to being more efficient. DivX/AVC replaced that for the same reasons and HVEC/VP9 replaced that. We’ve got AV1 coming now that looks to have beaten h.266/VVC to the punch, but it’s still a fairly linear progression of improvement.

            Given all that it’s kind of mad we’ve not seen the same level of iteration on image file formats, but that’s almost entirely down to browser wars and having to pick lowest common denominators. JPEG2000 might have taken off if it wasn’t for the fact only Apple ever implemented it in a browser—it was definitely a technically better format.

            • bouh@lemmy.world
              1·
              2 years ago

              It’s due to the maths behind. Special algebra is used for video compression, and a discovery has been made something like 15 years ago that allows a better video compression. It fueled technical progresses of the last years.

              For images, we basically hit the wall quite some time ago. The new technologies are more about engineering improvement than math improvement.

              Then there is the technical environment. It doesn’t matter if your technology is a bit better than the old one because the cost to change the whole technical environment is insane. That’s why ipv4 is still there for example. Changing everything for a new technology to be used is a long, costly and painful progress. But this is something only developpers can’t cope with, because the development culture is painfully ignorant of industry constraints and time lines.

            • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
              1·
              2 years ago

              and HVEC/VP9 replaced that

              I wouldn’t say that. Maybe youtube uses it by default (I don’t know, though) but a lot of other sites still use H264.

              And I don’t see AV1 even on the horizon.
              A couple of years ago (2?) I tried converting some of my huge H264 video files to AV1 with then up to date ffmpeg. It was horrendously slow. I don’t remember the numbers but I’m pretty sure it was progressing much slower than the clock.

            • LegionEris@lemmy.world
              1·
              2 years ago

              The real question is the hell did people downvote me?

              You shut someone down without informing or educating them on a text based discussion centric community with an academic stick up its ass. A one word response to a complex technical question is terrible etiquette in this sort of social environment.

            • williams_482@startrek.website
              1·
              2 years ago

              The real question is the hell did people downvote me? Looks like Lemmy turned into Reddit in a month’s time…

              Next time lead with the why instead of a one word “no”. This is a discussion forum, nobody knows who you are and certainly nobody is taking your word as truth if you don’t provide evidence.

  • 🇰 🔵 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
    11·
    2 years ago

    I don’t know what they are other than a file format; but I also don’t know what everyone’s problem with them is. They open in every viewer or editor I’ve used just fine so you can convert them by just saving as a new format if you’re trying to reupload them somewhere.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 years ago

      My gripe with them is that MacOS Finder won’t generate thumbnail previews of them and just displays a generic image icon. You’re free to say “that’s dumb, fuck Apple,” but I hope it illustrates a widespread example of how they’re aren’t as easy to deal with as JPGs and PNGs.

  • tvmole@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Why do so few apps (besides browsers) seem to support it? E.g. Win10 photo viewer and seemingly all my messaging apps

    The format itself sounds good, and I see it everywhere online, but is there some reason it’s unsupported?

    • stewsters@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Works great in Ubuntu.

      My guess is Microsoft doesn’t like it because Google came up with it. Ms has had some issues with recognizing open formats before. Could be you are using old versions of apps too.

    • BrikoX@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      .webp was developed Google so of course Microsoft hates it and tried to hinder it’s adoption.

  • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    Webp is an image format.

    Jpg is ancient, and gif, holy shit gif is from stone age.

    I dunno, if you’re playing a video, you probably want x264 or better these days, no? For music, we use some variant of mp4 or lossless at this point.

    Yet with pictures, for some reason we insist on the old shitty stuff.

    Using jpeg or gif is like using mp1 for music and VideoCD for video. Come on now.

    The only problem with webp is that there’s quality loss if you convert an already compressed jpeg into webp with high compression rate, like some web sites do. That can suck, but I don’t know how else to get people to use more modern formats. Otherwise we’d be using ancient formats into the 24th century.

    • over_clox@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 years ago

      The old shitty stuff was designed to compress images and stuff to be small enough to transfer on potato internet.

      Now the HTML size itself ends up larger than many of the images while they code in endless advertising and scripts.

      Old internet was better TBH.

      • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
        0·
        2 years ago

        This isn’t really relevant when webp is more optimised and smaller file size. People are determined to force things to be GIFs despite them looking terrible and taking up 50MB for 10 seconds of 720p looping video.

        • over_clox@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 years ago

          I never said GIF was all that great. Hell, beyond the fact that it was piss poor compression, it didn’t even have audio. 🤦‍♂️

          Now MPEG1/2, MP3 and JPEG weren’t all that bad, considering the era of technology they came from.

          I can definitely agree that modern compression has improved beyond that even, but at the same time now everything is automatically tagging in all sorts of extra data like, I dunno, the GPS location the image/video was taken. Like hey, let’s just broadcast everyone’s address to the rest of the world…

            • over_clox@lemmy.world
              0·
              2 years ago

              Of course, yes, you can. But back then, that was usually up to the person recording the media to manually add metadata later in processing.

              These days everything is getting tagged automatically as you’re recording stuff.

              Bye bye privacy.

  • Matriks404@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    It’s just a modern image format. What do you mean you need to make hoops to do anything with it? Unless you are using some old, outdated software you should be able to do everything with it just like with good old .png’s or jpg’s.

    • Obinice@lemmy.world
      11·
      2 years ago

      Old, outdated software? Windows 11 won’t open it, nor will Photoshop, last I checked.

      I’m fully aware of the format, but until it’s compatible with everything seamlessly the way PNG or JPEG are, I’d rather stick with those for now.

      What’s especially annoying is web pages that store their images seemingly as JPEG but are actually serving them through a CDN that converts them to WEBP if the browser supports them, so you try to save a seemingly JPEG JPEG, only to find at the last second it’s actually WEBP.

      • player2@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        FWIW I use Photoshop 2023 to convert webp images to other formats occasionally. My Mac has no issues viewing them but I think my windows 10 desktop has issues. Pretty much all browsers support it though.

  • amyipdev@lib.lgbt
    11·
    2 years ago

    supposedly it’s a better format. in practice it’s worse, and support is so low in most applications that it’s bad. but google forces what it wants, so that means when it can give you a webp, it will to encourage adoption.

    there are cases where alternative file formats can really be better: matroska, for example. webp is not better, however.