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.
How about a major one? Discord.
If you send any other image or gif, discord will show the image inline. Webp you have to download.
Want another one? Ifranview. An extremely common image viewer that has hyper customization and widespread support.
Want another one? OBS. Because that's what you need when streaming. Another hoop to jump through in converting the image.
Want another one? Windows. They classify it as html and don't display image data. Just left as white thumbnails.
Want another one? Photopea. Free online photoshop that you can access through web browser.
Want me to stop being bitchy towards you? Set an example and knock it off yourself.
See, that's fair. I don't know why people can't say so. It's time to name and shame companies that can't keep up with the times.
I'm not saying webp is the be-all end-all, but goddamn we need to start using more modern compression for things. Especially gif, which is a fucking horrible format for what people use it today.
I still remember when Internet Explorer wouldn't support png. It takes pressure to get crappy companies to move their ass.
In regards to both Windows and IrfanView, there's a reason why I've been using XnView for 25 years now, with its 500 supported image formats, including webp of course.
I don't know the technical aspects of webp, but as long as it's just another image format, any application that works with images should be able to just support it with an import/export filter. Again, XnView supports 500 formats, so it can't be impossible.
And all my apps support webp so well, I never realized there could be a problem with it except when I heard that Windows is starting to support it and I realised that oh yea, them being slow again.
Again it's not just webp, there's been a ton of attempts to bring better image formats, all the way back to jpeg2000. Some people just don't want to do any amount of work beyond the basics.
We've had the same problem with sound. Lots of good formats in the last 20 years - ogg, flac, aac - yet you can still find things that only play mp3, often only up to a certain bitrate. That's not a good reason why everyone should forever stick only to mp3.
Yet there's never been a problem with adopting new video formats, and that stuff is way harder to implement, often requiring hardware support to be feasible. We're not sticking to 30 years old Real Media and QuickTime. Images deserve better too.
XN all the things, works on just about any major OS too.
Irfanview supports it now, I downloaded a plugin last week that added the format.
Viewing webp is one of the reasons I even swapped to Irfanview.