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Is WebP really better than JPEG?

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Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#51

Post by innocenat »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #22

Does anyone know how these compare with the HEIC format that it seems my iPhone now uses by default? Is that non-mainstream, or otherwise not fit for comparison?

I haven't follow the trend much nor seen a recent comparison, so take this with a grain of salt.

WebP is based on VP8, which was considered to be competitor to H.264 (AVC). HEIC is based on H.265 (HEVC), which competes with VP9 and AV1. So I'd assume WebP is one generation behind HEIC. WebP was introduced 5 years before HEIC though.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#52

Post by tombert »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #30

I really want a better alpha-mask standard to emerge. PNG24 is attractive, but huge. PNG8/GIF works well, but is pretty limited. I don't think WebP is it, but we'll see what comes out of the scrum. I'll work with whatever that is, but I won't waste my time chasing will o' the wisp "standards."

It's still relatively huge, and not widely supported without a polyfill, but FLIF [0] is a pretty neat format that tends to be smaller than the equivalent PNG, and can be converted to a lossy image "on the fly", and also supports alpha transparency.

The polyfill is still kind of slow, at least compared to native PNG rendering on the browser, but it does work, and hopefully some day it can be integrated into the standard.

[0] http://flif.info

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#53

Post by andrewxdiamond »

rakoo wrote: post #43

Extremely subjective, personal data point: I've been running with an extension ( https://bandwidth-hero.com/ ) that compresses all images (including jpeg) and renders them in webp. I'm a typical social networks browser, so among the images I see a high majority of them don't need high quality. I'm running the extension with max compression but still keep colors: compression artifacts are clearly visible, but in my op…

How does an extension resize an image without downloading it? Can it selectively read bytes from the stream?

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#54

Post by discreditable »

lowmemcpu wrote: post #7

I'm using Firefox and just tried to save a webp image and it tried to save as a web page. [initially, I said no.. see edit below] Edit: Looks like it was that specific website and they are doing something odd, so I retract my initial judgement.

Is that server sending the image with the correct mimetype?

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#55

Post by ksec »

barkerja wrote: post #15
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #12

I just relaunched a website that makes extensive use of photographic collages that necessitate alpha backgrounds. They were previously shipping "retina-grade", multi-megabyte images all over, a typical page load could easily reach 25mb. I managed to refit it with ` ` tags using WEBP as well as JP2. The latter was a great deal of trouble, it appears that "the community" (notably Gatsby and Contentful) are very happy t…

WEBP support has been added to the next version of Safari (14).

Yes, and I submitted it on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23614193

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#56

Post by anonymoushn »

buboard wrote: post #16

chrome keeps changing downloaded images to webP which is annoyin af. can't even find a way to disable it

Chrome sends "Accept: image/webp" by default when requesting images. Some CDNs send webps to clients who send this header and original-format images to clients who do not.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#59

Post by reaperducer »

barkerja wrote: post #15
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #12

I just relaunched a website that makes extensive use of photographic collages that necessitate alpha backgrounds. They were previously shipping "retina-grade", multi-megabyte images all over, a typical page load could easily reach 25mb. I managed to refit it with ` ` tags using WEBP as well as JP2. The latter was a great deal of trouble, it appears that "the community" (notably Gatsby and Contentful) are very happy t…

WEBP support has been added to the next version of Safari (14).

WEBP support has been added to the next version of Safari (14).

Good to hear. But that still means it'll still be 1½ years before enough users in the wild are on iOS 14 to make the change without breaking the sites for a large number of people. At least, from what I read, iOS upgrade adoption is very quick compared with other platforms.

WebP is something to look forward to on my company's internal projects, but externally we still have to support IE11, as it's still very widespread in the medical field, and I haven't seen the user numbers budge on that.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#60

Post by karamanolev »

acqq wrote: post #48
karamanolev wrote: post #33

I'm surprised this doesn't include Google Guetzli ( https://github.com/google/guetzli ) in the comparison. In my experience trying to optimize product images for an eCommerce site, this provided the best compression. Yes, it's ridiculously slow, but for encode-once-transmit-often scenarios, it's perfectly usable.

Did anybody really find any reason to use that? https://www.pixelz.com/blog/guetzli-mozjpeg-comparison/ "MozJPEG files had fewer bytes 6 out of 8 times MozJPEG and Guetzli were visually indistinguishable MozJPEG encoded literally hundreds to a thousand times faster than Guetzli MozJPEG supports progressive loading"

I am compressing 200x200px and 800x800px images. For those sizes, while the encoding speed is slow for real-time use cases, for product images it's completely irrelevant - anything under 1 minute/image gets a pass and lower, generally, isn't better (or worse). I'm looking at absolute image quality/byte and it's even more niche than that - it's bytes to pass a threshold of acceptable quality (85 on Guetzli IIRC). I don't care about very low or very high qualities.

In terms of absolute bytes to pass this threshold, Guetzli felt the best when I was doing the research (~ mid-2017). I don't have any hard data to back this though - I did the experiment with 5-6 different product images, drew the conclusion and started using Guetzli.

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