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Is WebP really better than JPEG?

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Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#41

Post by irrational »

oauea wrote: post #14
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…

Safari Mobile is a broken mess not worth supporting.

But it is the only browser on iOS (even if you install another browser, under the hood it MUST use the safari rendering engine, so all browser use on iOS is really Safari). Not supporting means you are not supporting any iPhone or iPad user. You might be anti-apple in your personal technology choices, but can you be anti-apple for whoever you work for?

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#42

Post by slipheen »

crazygringo wrote: post #32
buboard wrote: post #16

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

It's not and you can't. The website is service up the images as webP. Chrome is just giving you what the website gives you, there's nothing to "disable".

There's an extension you can use to save it as a different format, but it's transcoding.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-image-as-type...

In theory, you could probably do some combination of altering the user agent, and/or blocking .onload for webp images (which is often used to detect webp support).

If you changed both, most sites would probably serve you a jpg/png version.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#43

Post by rakoo »

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 opinion they're not a problem. Looking at /r/all right now, there are 2 images that "deserve" to remain at the original resolution, the rest is typical pictures of text/memes that don't need all the bytes they currently have.

The result: overall I saved 80% of data, just with images.

In my case it's not so much a debate of JPEG vs WebP, but a debate of whether it's ok to keep images _on the web_ in their unoptimized form the way they are today, to which of course my answer is no. We don't need high quality images of a Facebook screenshot when compressing it to 20% of its original size can convey the same information with no subjective loss.

I do agree on the unwieldy nature of WebP though, it's still mostly a read-only format right now and turns the web into a consumption platform

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#44

Post by irrational »

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 thought HEIC is apple only and not supported by any browser. Is it even supported by Safari?

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#45

Post by zerocrates »

izacus wrote: post #34
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?

It's a proprietary patent-encumbered format which isn't really widely supported in the web browsers.

I happened to look it up on caniuse.com yesterday and it's just a field of solid red: nobody supports it, not even Safari.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#46

Post by letitbeirie »

oauea wrote: post #14
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…

Safari Mobile is a broken mess not worth supporting.

Said that about IE5 in 1999. Didn't work out for me.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#47

Post by coldtea »

oauea wrote: post #14
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…

Safari Mobile is a broken mess not worth supporting.

What problem exactly you have?

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#48

Post by acqq »

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"

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#49

Post by Y-bar »

izacus wrote: post #34
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?

It's a proprietary patent-encumbered format which isn't really widely supported in the web browsers.

Patent-encumbered? Yes.

> proprietary

No. It is an open standard (ISO/IEC 23008)

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#50

Post by alex_portabella »

I've recently converted some images to WebP on my side project Portabella [1]. I did it to appease Googles page speed test for SEO. But I agree with other comments in this thread that it's annoying so I might switch them all to JPEG and be done with it.

[1] https://portabella.io

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