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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

#41

Post by xpose2000 »

Theodores wrote: post #9
workhere-io wrote: post #2

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…

Just to follow up on your comment. For those less willing to use the apache module, there is always the pagespeed web service where you can change DNS to get this accomplished. (And utilize Google's CDN as well).

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#42

Post by emilis_info »

threeseed wrote: post #35
buzzkills wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took longer than that for png to stick.

You missed my point. Technology is not the reason WebP is probably going nowhere. Apple, Microsoft and Firefox for whatever reason (politics/principle) either won't support defacto standards or have to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing so (see SPDY). And without those three you are never going to get above 45%.

How can you call things unsupported by the majority of players in the market "defacto standards"?

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#43

Post by jlouis »

workhere-io wrote: post #2

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/ ).

Google thought of this. Their Chrome browser probes for WebP server-side support through content negotiation. So you can still serve JPEGs to browsers, but those which are modern can get WebP images.

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#45

Post by evilduck »

userbinator wrote: post #29
ZenoArrow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that prescient? Standards can get replaced when something better comes along. The question is whether WebP will be compelling enough to overtake what came before. It looks promising at first glance. If anyone at a browser development company is reading this, vector image formats are more in need of disruption than raster image formats, SVG is versatile but it's bulky, a more compact vector image format would b…

> a more compact vector image format would be welcome SWF. It's more than just a vector image format, but it is far better than SVG in terms of both filesize and resources required to render. Too bad for the "Flash hater's stigma" and the direction Adobe took their player after the acquistion... although there are now a few other alternatives including Mozilla's Shumway.

SWF as an image format also requires a client side runtime be installed. A runtime with spotty cross platform performance and a poor security track record at that. The distaste for Flash is pretty well justified, I'll take the larger and slower SVGs over Flash any day.

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#46

Post by evilduck »

threeseed wrote: post #18
[deleted] wrote: 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.

https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/webp_lossless_...

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#47

Post by clarry »

emilis_info wrote: post #42
threeseed wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed my point. Technology is not the reason WebP is probably going nowhere. Apple, Microsoft and Firefox for whatever reason (politics/principle) either won't support defacto standards or have to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing so (see SPDY). And without those three you are never going to get above 45%.

How can you call things unsupported by the majority of players in the market "defacto standards"?

On top of that, SPDY is an experimental protocol that may eventually (after enough iteration) make it into a standard (HTTP 2.0). It's not standard yet, and definitely not defacto standard.

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#48

Post by mnsc »

danmaz74 wrote: post #14
Too wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the transparency channel also compressed or only the rgb?

Alpha channel should be non-lossy compressed AFAIK.

"should" as in it's your opinion? From the docs it looks like the alpha channel can be encoded lossy as well.

https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/cwebp#options

  -alpha_q int
  Specify the compression factor for alpha compression
  between 0 and 100. Lossless compression of alpha is
  achieved using a value of 100, while the lower values
  result in a lossy compression. The default is 100.

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#49

Post by crazygringo »

Interestingly enough, WebP is a great format to use if you don't want users saving your images.

More than once I've right-clicked an image to save it to disk, only later to discover I have no program on my computer which can open or view it, except for Chrome! No thumbnails, no previews, no Photoshop, nothing. (I know there are plug-ins, if I really wanted to.)

Re: WebP – A new image format for the Web

#50

Post by [deleted] »

Theodores wrote: post #9
workhere-io wrote: post #2

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…

[deleted]
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