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WebP – A new image format for the Web

developers.google.com

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Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#11

Things to consider: WebP browser support is currently terrible ( http://caniuse.com/webp ), and it seems the solution to make WebP images display in non-supported browsers is through the help of a rather large JS file ( http://webpjs.appspot.com/ ).

Actually it is Google Pagespeed where the magic happens. You serve jpg, gif, png, pcx^H^H^H and then your nginx/Apache converts them to webp for you, on the fly, cached. If the person requesting your page runs chrome they get webp. So that means everyone else gets a slow image format? Yes, but you have saved bandwidth and your pages have loaded quickly for ~50% of your users. I don't think webp is really a source ima…

I'm confused what you are doing. You are taking an existing lossy format e.g. JPG and then recoding it in another lossy format. So yes you may save an insignificant amount of bandwidth but at the expense of introducing potentially significant artefacts in your images. What serious web developer is going to want to do this ?

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#12

Things to consider: WebP browser support is currently terrible ( http://caniuse.com/webp ), and it seems the solution to make WebP images display in non-supported browsers is through the help of a rather large JS file ( http://webpjs.appspot.com/ ).

This will improve with time, every new technology starts like this and if it's better than the current technology, it sticks.

WebP was released 3 years ago hence your entire premise is faulty.

The real truth is that being the best technically rarely guarantees success in the market.

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it is Google Pagespeed where the magic happens. You serve jpg, gif, png, pcx^H^H^H and then your nginx/Apache converts them to webp for you, on the fly, cached. If the person requesting your page runs chrome they get webp. So that means everyone else gets a slow image format? Yes, but you have saved bandwidth and your pages have loaded quickly for ~50% of your users. I don't think webp is really a source ima…

I'm confused what you are doing. You are taking an existing lossy format e.g. JPG and then recoding it in another lossy format. So yes you may save an insignificant amount of bandwidth but at the expense of introducing potentially significant artefacts in your images. What serious web developer is going to want to do this ?

[deleted]

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#15
I sense another flame war. Unless there is new data from a new set of image quality/compression tests, I would urge people to just look up the old threads instead of rehashing the arguments again.

Note: Although YouTube announced a switch, Google+ has long been using WebP to serve up images in the stream with substantial savings, so the usage of it by Google on their services is not new.

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will improve with time, every new technology starts like this and if it's better than the current technology, it sticks.

WebP was released 3 years ago hence your entire premise is faulty. The real truth is that being the best technically rarely guarantees success in the market.

It took longer than that for png to stick.

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will improve with time, every new technology starts like this and if it's better than the current technology, it sticks.

WebP was released 3 years ago hence your entire premise is faulty. The real truth is that being the best technically rarely guarantees success in the market.

[deleted]

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#18
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused what you are doing. You are taking an existing lossy format e.g. JPG and then recoding it in another lossy format. So yes you may save an insignificant amount of bandwidth but at the expense of introducing potentially significant artefacts in your images. What serious web developer is going to want to do this ?

[deleted]

WebP IS lossy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP

And as you can see from the page there are artefacts that humans can perceive.

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

WebP IS lossy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP And as you can see from the page there are artefacts that humans can perceive.

Both the original article and the Wikipedia page state that WebP support lossy and lossless compression. I guess using lossless WebP would not make sense for JPEG files as the result would probably be bigger than the original JPEG, but it might work well with PNG.
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