Comment by F3nd0
6 hours ago
Personally, I avoid WebP out of spite. While it has greatly improved over previous formats in certain uses, it has been lacking or offering only marginal improvements in others. That didn’t stop Google from pushing it hard on the web.
I was left feeling like the next time we adopt a format that tries to do everything, it should actually do everything just as well or better than its predecessors. Lo and behold, JPEG XL is probably the first format which actually achieves this, covering all kinds of pictures you can think of and doing a pretty good job on all of them. So for the first time, I feel like the format has actually earned its place in the ecosystem, rather than just being some megacorporation’s personal favourite.
Of course, this point of view is emotional more than rational. Technically, WebP is a sensible choice, so I don’t mean to discourage anyone from using it today.
It wasn't some one company's choice and push. Almost everyone wins when bandwidth is cut and you get higher quality for less space. I'd argue most people's hatred for webp purely comes down to a few other corporations like microsoft, not supporting it well in the early days and blaming the format instead.
Well other than the "use webpee or we're going to lower your search rank" thing they did.
> It wasn't some one company's choice and push.
How so? This table [1] shows the adoption dates for WebP in various popular programs (as does Wikipedia [2]). Of all high-profile programs, Chrome was the only early adopter; other browsers were avoiding it for years, not to mention off-line software. Mozilla went as far as to work on a JPEG encoder [3] after WebP was introduced by Google, to see if maybe JPEG itself could be improved enough. How does that not read like one company’s choice and push?
> Almost everyone wins when bandwidth is cut and you get higher quality for less space.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean you immediately adopt every new codec that brings improvements in some area. With every new feature comes new code, new baggage, new potential attack surface. You have to ask if the improvements are big and consistent enough to go through the effort and burden the entire ecosystem with yet another format everyone now has to deal with. You need to think of the user and developer experience both in and outside of the web.
Microsoft would have been perfectly within their right to blame the format, since Google just decided to let it run wild on the web without garnering more support for it first. The format has its pros and cons, and it’s up to all the involved parties to weigh them and hopefully reach a consensus.