cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2207898

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.

  • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.mlEnglish
    253·
    1 year ago

    Webp is just one more instace of Google trying to own the modern web.

    Give me JPEG XL or give me death, motherfuckers.

    • kate@lemmy.uhhoh.comEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I prefer AVIF, it has significantly better browser support, and since AV1 is getting all the hardware support avif will benefit from this too.

      • Gerula@lemmy.world
        63·
        1 year ago

        Actually everything started like that with big companies that don’t do evil … open source … until it wasn’t anyone …

        • zea@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          21·
          1 year ago

          What are they gonna do, add proprietary extensions? Nobody will support those. It’s open, and it only works by being open. It’s actually in Google’s interests for it to be open, widespread, and an effective format because it saves them bandwidth and improves UX on their actual proprietary stuff like YouTube.

      • Gerula@lemmy.world
        42·
        1 year ago

        Actually everything started lime that with a big company open source … until it wasn’t anyone …