Rejected Disable the WEBP image format

[Zemus]

I firmly believe and have maintained for years that it is a plague on the modern Internet with the end result of encouraging us to save less data, because it's easier to view this fringe image format in most web browsers than to download plugins for your image viewer. Additionally, its creation was nothing more than a predatory business move by Google to gauge and show off how much they can control the Net, so we would only be playing into the most hated company's hands anyway.

Years have passed, and still no image viewers support it from a fresh install. I request that any images uploaded in this format be converted to PNG and that any images uploaded are not converted to WEBP. There's some processing between when we hit attach and the post shows up, right? Could this little tweak fit in there?

Here's the example that got me to post this, by the way.

 

[Yousef]

I’m glad my waifu thread is potentially helping the site
Go off king ?

 

[MasterEn]

i did something at some point so my computer opens those files with GIMP 2.10. it's probably like with disk drives, the computer companies just decided that the files necessary to make those work with modern laptops. i had to look around google for files to make my portable usb disk drive work with my laptop.

 

[Zerpina]

@Zemus 100,000,000% Agree. i hate .Webp with the Fury of 1000 Exploding Watermelons... or Supernova, which ever.
But, joking aside. i do hate this format, anytime i have to dl it. i use GIMP to convert it to PNG, hell I'd rather use JPG ffs

 

[χKai]

PNG is the superior format by a longshot.

 

[Lee__Kanker]

@Zemus 100,000,000% Agree. i hate .Webp with the Fury of 1000 Exploding Watermelons... or Supernova, which ever.
But, joking aside. i do hate this format, anytime i have to dl it. i use GIMP to convert it to PNG, hell I'd rather use JPG ffs

View attachment 9955

Usagi is so cute <3

Webpm took many monthsd off my life with how many times I had to edit something because the image I copied was in its format

 

[Zemus]

@Zemus 100,000,000% Agree. i hate .Webp with the Fury of 1000 Exploding Watermelons... or Supernova, which ever.
But, joking aside. i do hate this format, anytime i have to dl it. i use GIMP to convert it to PNG, hell I'd rather use JPG ffs

View attachment 9955

I use browser extensions to save them as PNG, but there's still the hassle of needing to select a different option and keeping the default download folder the same across multiple programs.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

It mined a lot of my early posts and articles through its failure to display.

 

[Enian]

Webp is not a bad format. It's actually quite good and a lot better than JPEG, which it tries to compete with. It does have a lossless mode, making it also comparable to PNG, but that's hardly the thing it tries to accomplish. No one I know ever complained about PNGs. JPEG on the other hand is far from perfect.

Webp is based on the VP8 codec, which was originally developed by On2. On2 was bought by Google. Still, the format is open source and licensed under the BSD license. Not something you could say about JPEG back when it was released. Nobody is stopping developers from implementing Webp into their programs. If those developers were to spend an hour or two to implement the format into their programs, you wouldn't even notice a difference.

It's also not about saving space or bandwidth for consumers, but about reducing stress on the infrastructures and data centers in general. If you have to service millions of images every second, a size difference of 30% or even just 10% quickly adds up.

And cost is also the reason why converting every image uploaded into another format is not really a great solution for a relatively small and not all that profitable website like this one.

Now, personally I advocate for a more general application of AVIF, but that's probably wishful thinking.

 

[Clippy]

Webp is not a bad format. It's actually quite good and a lot better than JPEG, which it tries to compete with. It does have a lossless mode, making it also comparable to PNG, but that's hardly the thing it tries to accomplish. No one I know ever complained about PNGs. JPEG on the other hand is far from perfect.

Webp is based on the VP8 codec, which was originally developed by On2. On2 was bought by Google. Still, the format is open source and licensed under the BSD license. Not something you could say about JPEG back when it was released. Nobody is stopping developers from implementing Webp into their programs. If those developers were to spend an hour or two to implement the format into their programs, you wouldn't even notice a difference.

It's also not about saving space or bandwidth for consumers, but about reducing stress on the infrastructures and data centers in general. If you have to service millions of images every second, a size difference of 30% or even just 10% quickly adds up.

And cost is also the reason why converting every image uploaded into another format is not really a great solution for a relatively small and not all that profitable website like this one.

Now, personally I advocate for a more general application of AVIF, but that's probably wishful thinking.

Reject modernity, return to BMP.

 

[MistHunter]

I agree with you. the webp format, is annoying to no end, no matter what benefits it has.

 

[Varyag]

man imagine if Google had allowed JPEG-XL to exist. Hoping AVIF doesn't get similarly buried too...

 

[RageBurner]

Webp is not a bad format. It's actually quite good and a lot better than JPEG, which it tries to compete with. It does have a lossless mode, making it also comparable to PNG, but that's hardly the thing it tries to accomplish. No one I know ever complained about PNGs. JPEG on the other hand is far from perfect.

Webp is based on the VP8 codec, which was originally developed by On2. On2 was bought by Google. Still, the format is open source and licensed under the BSD license. Not something you could say about JPEG back when it was released. Nobody is stopping developers from implementing Webp into their programs. If those developers were to spend an hour or two to implement the format into their programs, you wouldn't even notice a difference.

It's also not about saving space or bandwidth for consumers, but about reducing stress on the infrastructures and data centers in general. If you have to service millions of images every second, a size difference of 30% or even just 10% quickly adds up.

And cost is also the reason why converting every image uploaded into another format is not really a great solution for a relatively small and not all that profitable website like this one.

Now, personally I advocate for a more general application of AVIF, but that's probably wishful thinking.

I just want to say I appreciate you taking your time to explain the technical side of it. At face value Webp comes across as one of those arbitrary YT interface changes that Google sometimes rolls out, and invariably the end user is impacted in usability.

That said there seem to be legitimate reasons to embrace it.

 

[Bakuma1997]

When i download images and that format appears i swap it to PNG or JPG by cvhanging the name, 80% sucess, but still we have to find .Webp format's inventor's house and send him a little love

*Prepares a nuke labeled "LOVE"*

 

[Zemus]

Webp is not a bad format. It's actually quite good and a lot better than JPEG, which it tries to compete with. It does have a lossless mode, making it also comparable to PNG, but that's hardly the thing it tries to accomplish. No one I know ever complained about PNGs. JPEG on the other hand is far from perfect.

Webp is based on the VP8 codec, which was originally developed by On2. On2 was bought by Google. Still, the format is open source and licensed under the BSD license. Not something you could say about JPEG back when it was released. Nobody is stopping developers from implementing Webp into their programs. If those developers were to spend an hour or two to implement the format into their programs, you wouldn't even notice a difference.

It's also not about saving space or bandwidth for consumers, but about reducing stress on the infrastructures and data centers in general. If you have to service millions of images every second, a size difference of 30% or even just 10% quickly adds up.

And cost is also the reason why converting every image uploaded into another format is not really a great solution for a relatively small and not all that profitable website like this one.

Now, personally I advocate for a more general application of AVIF, but that's probably wishful thinking.

I'll concede there could be a separate technical decision here that I can't comment on since I don't run the site. Obviously WEBP was made and implemented by real people with a real reason, but they were bureaucrats, and it shows in the shockingly slow adoption. My point is a practical one, placing the facts you presented in the context of present circumstances.

 

[χKai]

Make em do the fusion dance and we'll have a big battle between the PNGBMPEGs and AVIFVIWEBPs.

 

[ciro64]

It's open source at least. Yeah, it's Google's puppet, but the whole world of computing is fucked beyond repair a long ago. I honestly just feel annoyed when a site makes me go through the trouble of converting a webp to png. This site already does this to an extent as the images doesn't show in-page and I'd rather go the opposite direction you're going.

However, the automatic server-side webp-to-png solution that you pointed is a nice one and would make both sides happy.

Is the webp algorithm bloated, hard to implement or inefficient in some way? (compared to modern technology?) Because going into those details would be a good way to convince me to hate it too.

 

[raveci]

all popular open source projects that deal with images support it, because there is no reason not to, only proprietary sh*tware has problems with it cause of its absolute state

 

[Spike's iconSpike]

Nothing to disable. We already do not convert any images to webp.
The user uploaded that format themselves.

I can't make the forum convert them on the forum without custom development.

If you want to save them as png there are browser extensions. like:

WebP / Avif image converter - Chrome Web Store

Convert Webp, Avif and other types of image before saving.

chromewebstore.google.com