Maybe this should come with a warning. The purpose of WebP is to quickly serve images to the user without grabbing the entire image data. Without WebP all images will be fully loaded, in the right conditions a page could load real slow.
I love webp, but your explanation is a bit confused. Webp is typically lossy, just as jpeg — only, it’s more efficiently compressed, meaning smaller size for the same image quality. So there’s no ‘entire image data’, there are only different approximations of the original image and different compressed files. Full-blown lossless images in PNG or other formats take several times more data.
Disabling webp in favor of jpeg would use like 20-40% more data, in comparison. Which still sucks, but not as much.
I wasn’t going to get into the whole lossyness of the formats and just simplified to full image instead of compressed formatted.
That is interesting that it is only saving 20%-40%. I was under the impression that the page only rendered the image size necessary to fit the layout and not the full resolution image. Forcing it to less lossy or lossless would mean that the larger image would always be available to be served to be rendered without any web request.
That’s a rather interesting consideration as to whether rendering at smaller sizes skips decoding parts of the image.
First, the presented file is normally always loaded in full, because that’s how file transfer works over the web. Until lately, there were no different sizes available, and that only became widely-ish spread because of Apple’s ‘Retina’ displays with different dots-per-inch resolution, mostly hidpi being two times the linear size of the standard dpi. Some sites, like Wikipedia, also support resizing images on the fly to some target dimensions, which results in a new image of the JPEG or other format. In any case, to my somewhat experienced knowledge, JPEG itself doesn’t support sending every second row or anything like that, so you always get a file of a predetermined size.
First-and-a-half, various web apps can implement their own methods for loading lower- or higher-res images, which they prepare in advance. E.g. a local analogue to Facebook almost certainly loads various prepared-in-advance low-res images for viewing in the apps or on the site, but has the full-res images available on request, via a menu.
Second, I would imagine that JPEG decoding always results in the image of the original size, which is then dynamically resized to the viewport of the target display — particularly since many apps allow zooming in or out of the image on the fly. Specifically, I think decoding the JPEG image creates a native lossless image similar to BMP or somesuch (essentially just a 2d array of pixel colors), which is then fed to the OS’s rendering capabilities, taking quite a chuck of memory. Of course, by now this is all accelerated by the hardware a whole lot, with the common algorithms being prepared to render raw pixels, JPEG, and a whole bunch of other formats.
It would be quite interesting if file decoding itself could just skip some part of the rows or columns, but I don’t think that’s quite like the compression works in current formats (at least in lossy ones, which depend on the previous data to encode later data). Although afaik JPEG encodes the image in rectangles like 16x16 or something like that, so it could be that whole chunks could be skipped altogether.
Because I’m tired of all this nonsense where just because a thing is a mature technology, it’s considered obsolete. Stop constantly pushing for the next thing. Keep the things that work.
Webp is a smaller file size than jpeg for the same image quality in almost all circumstances - so it’s more efficient and quicker to load. It also supports lossless compression, transparency, and animation, none of which jpeg do. And the jpeg gets noticable visual artefacts at a much higher quality than webp does.
People didn’t adopt it to annoy you. It’s started to replace jpeg for the same reason jpeg started to replace bmp - it’s a better, more efficient format.
Webp is a smaller file size than jpeg for the same image quality in almost all circumstances
For lower quality images sure, for high quality ones JPEG will beat it (WebP, being an old video format, only supports a quarter of the colour resolution than JPEG does, etc.) JPEG is actually so good that it still comes out ahead in a bunch of benchmarks, it’s just it’s now starting to show it’s age technology wise (like WebP, it’s limited to 8bpc in most cases)
It also doesn’t hurt that Google ranked sites using WebP/AVIF higher than ones that aren’t (via lighthouse).
Edit: I should clarify, this is the lossy mode. The lossless mode gives better compression than PNG, but is still limited to 8bpc, so can’t store high bit depth, or HDR images, like PNG can.
It’s unreasonable to stop further software development just because there’s a ‘mature’ solution around. Besides, just because a solution is ‘mature’ doesn’t make it good.
And considering that it seems like you can still use the original, about 30 year old format, doesn’t look like there’s any harm for the folks not needing or able to use the new stuff.
I just use old JPEGs. Not JPEG2000, not PNG, not WebP, not JPEG XL.
Feel free to use floppy disks. Btw if you are online, you use WebP and PNG all the time 🤣
Not if they use wget to only download the HTML!
Sir, don’t you dare encroach on those Lynx and W3M users. They don’t need no stinking images!
Lynx is the best browser.
I prefer offpunk.
If you are using Firefox:
Maybe this should come with a warning. The purpose of WebP is to quickly serve images to the user without grabbing the entire image data. Without WebP all images will be fully loaded, in the right conditions a page could load real slow.
I love webp, but your explanation is a bit confused. Webp is typically lossy, just as jpeg — only, it’s more efficiently compressed, meaning smaller size for the same image quality. So there’s no ‘entire image data’, there are only different approximations of the original image and different compressed files. Full-blown lossless images in PNG or other formats take several times more data.
Disabling webp in favor of jpeg would use like 20-40% more data, in comparison. Which still sucks, but not as much.
I wasn’t going to get into the whole lossyness of the formats and just simplified to full image instead of compressed formatted. That is interesting that it is only saving 20%-40%. I was under the impression that the page only rendered the image size necessary to fit the layout and not the full resolution image. Forcing it to less lossy or lossless would mean that the larger image would always be available to be served to be rendered without any web request.
That’s a rather interesting consideration as to whether rendering at smaller sizes skips decoding parts of the image.
First, the presented file is normally always loaded in full, because that’s how file transfer works over the web. Until lately, there were no different sizes available, and that only became widely-ish spread because of Apple’s ‘Retina’ displays with different dots-per-inch resolution, mostly hidpi being two times the linear size of the standard dpi. Some sites, like Wikipedia, also support resizing images on the fly to some target dimensions, which results in a new image of the JPEG or other format. In any case, to my somewhat experienced knowledge, JPEG itself doesn’t support sending every second row or anything like that, so you always get a file of a predetermined size.
First-and-a-half, various web apps can implement their own methods for loading lower- or higher-res images, which they prepare in advance. E.g. a local analogue to Facebook almost certainly loads various prepared-in-advance low-res images for viewing in the apps or on the site, but has the full-res images available on request, via a menu.
Second, I would imagine that JPEG decoding always results in the image of the original size, which is then dynamically resized to the viewport of the target display — particularly since many apps allow zooming in or out of the image on the fly. Specifically, I think decoding the JPEG image creates a native lossless image similar to BMP or somesuch (essentially just a 2d array of pixel colors), which is then fed to the OS’s rendering capabilities, taking quite a chuck of memory. Of course, by now this is all accelerated by the hardware a whole lot, with the common algorithms being prepared to render raw pixels, JPEG, and a whole bunch of other formats.
It would be quite interesting if file decoding itself could just skip some part of the rows or columns, but I don’t think that’s quite like the compression works in current formats (at least in lossy ones, which depend on the previous data to encode later data). Although afaik JPEG encodes the image in rectangles like 16x16 or something like that, so it could be that whole chunks could be skipped altogether.
Your name is amazing
No, I have WebP blocked in my about:config. And I use Pale Moon, which actually blocks the things unlike modern FF. And I don’t load PNG either.
Do you also hit yourself in the nuts every morning to show the world how tough you are?
lmao
I find this interesting there an advantage to the older formats or is this just for compatibility with custom photo editing tools?
Compatibility is an advantage.
AVIF started heavily creeping in, too.
I’ve yet to see any AVIF in the wild. I think support for it is not quite there yet, everybody is still relying on WEBP.
I’ve seen a lot of avifs masquerading as jpegs lol (I know because KDE Dolphin for some reason isn’t showing a preview for those until I rename them)
Why though
Because I’m tired of all this nonsense where just because a thing is a mature technology, it’s considered obsolete. Stop constantly pushing for the next thing. Keep the things that work.
“How dare they invent a more efficient image encoding! Back in my day we had bmp and we liked it!” - grandpa simpson
So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time
I mean, BMP does still work as an uncompressed, artifact-free format.
you can have uncompressed png too
Sure. But you use bmp when you want to nuke your drive space for no real reason.
Wdym? This guy is still using punch cards
Webp is a smaller file size than jpeg for the same image quality in almost all circumstances - so it’s more efficient and quicker to load. It also supports lossless compression, transparency, and animation, none of which jpeg do. And the jpeg gets noticable visual artefacts at a much higher quality than webp does.
People didn’t adopt it to annoy you. It’s started to replace jpeg for the same reason jpeg started to replace bmp - it’s a better, more efficient format.
For lower quality images sure, for high quality ones JPEG will beat it (WebP, being an old video format, only supports a quarter of the colour resolution than JPEG does, etc.) JPEG is actually so good that it still comes out ahead in a bunch of benchmarks, it’s just it’s now starting to show it’s age technology wise (like WebP, it’s limited to 8bpc in most cases)
It also doesn’t hurt that Google ranked sites using WebP/AVIF higher than ones that aren’t (via lighthouse).
Edit: I should clarify, this is the lossy mode. The lossless mode gives better compression than PNG, but is still limited to 8bpc, so can’t store high bit depth, or HDR images, like PNG can.
Edit 2: s/bpp/bpc/
It is controlled by google tho
It’s unreasonable to stop further software development just because there’s a ‘mature’ solution around. Besides, just because a solution is ‘mature’ doesn’t make it good.
And considering that it seems like you can still use the original, about 30 year old format, doesn’t look like there’s any harm for the folks not needing or able to use the new stuff.
these damn kids will wake up on day and go, “why do you need xpg? jpgxl is just fine!”
they don’t realize it yet that the only reason why jpeg xl exists is to silently slip that corpo collar around their necks.
🤷 only time can feed wisdom and cure stupid.
you know, using a better encoding is better for your dial-up internet too
Oh yeah? Well I named my firstborn child JPEG!