Comment by karim79

The major blunder here is browsers refusing to support silent videos in <img> tags etc. so we end up with all these hacks. Instead we got animated webp that you can't use for progressive enhancement because it doesn't have its own mime type and browsers reported support for image/webp before implementing animation support. And webp is also very limited when it comes to inter-frame compression for no good reason at all.

Not to mention if you for some odd reason wanted to do gif-style animations, you can also do it with apng or webp. You shouldn't, real video format makes more sense, but even if you did there is still no reason to use gif.

Reminds me of when Imgur started trying to push changing gifs over to gifv, which were just mp4 with a strange new file extension. I didn't like their approach but it really was such an improvement on file size and quality.

I am sure that none of the `.gif` files on my computer have been silently replaced.

And there absolutely are cases where a lossless GIF is smaller than a lossy video format.

Precisely. Kind of reminds me of "Hoover" or "Kleenex". Coca cola even. It has brand equity which means it's not going away any time soon.

I began a dispute on the English Wikipedia which revealed that more than a few people use “GIF” to describe, not a file format, but a visual style of looping animation.

> Gif is a weird one because it's silently been replaced while keeping the name around. Virtually every software using the term "gif" actually uses a h264/vp9 video with no sound.

Then, long live the iMessage and Whatsup exploits, because SW developers are not able to do things right.

PNGs will persist because I know that they're lossless by looking at the filename. When I hit File > Save as .png, I don't have to inspect output metadata (that image viewers don't expose) or play around with exporter settings.

It's unfortunate that we didn't give lossless webps a separate extension. Frankly I think even saving them as .png would've better than what we have now - people roughly understand that a .png is an image without artifacts, and any self-respecting image viewer will inspect magic bytes before opening a file anyways.

I do not know whether this has anything to do with any limitation in the WebP format, because it is more likely that this is some kind of bias in the kind of authors of Web pages who choose the WebP image format, who might also choose more aggressive compression settings, but for me WebP is a synonym for "low-quality image".

This means, that at least for the Web sites that I happen to access frequently, whenever I see PNG or JPEG images they typically have a better quality than when I see WebP images.

I do not know whether when browsing the Web I see frequently any AVIF images. They are either rare or they have a similar quality with JPEG images, so they did not stand out like WebP, where I perceived a degradation, so I noticed that the image format was different.

I do not care much about the speed of decoding Web images, because the speed of loading Web pages is determined mostly by the amount of junk JS that is included and not by the loading and decoding of the included images. So for me the quality of the included images is more important, thus WebP is something that I dislike, while JPEG is far too limited, so I would prefer JPEG XL images.

The arguments in TFA do not seem entirely honest, because the presented data confirms the low quality of WebP in comparison with JPEG XL, and because the 2 compared JPEG XL implementations differ in their performance by a factor more than 2, so it is likely that they are both immature and one could still accelerate the decoding of JPEG XL by at least 2 or 3 times in comparison with the best of them.

The only claim of TFA that seems valid, is that if AVIF is really as good as claimed, it could be sufficient for Web pages that want to show only highly-compressed images and good for replacing JPEG for such a use, while JPEG XL might be strictly required only for applications that need higher quality, i.e. for the processing and storing of photographic images.

JNG (jpeg network graphics) is essentially jpeg that support alpha channel.

Png is still being updated, just last year it was updated to support a wider color space than any other web format. This shipped in all browsers before the official spec was publicly so you’ve been seeing Png upgrades without even realizing it