One forum I use does not embed webp links. They show up as links, period, and it's a damn waste of my time to convert. Small is beautiful unless your forum is run by two people, not having the time to update code all the time.
Many image links that work for search engines don't work for the site and I have to download and then upload to a host to get an embeddable image link.
Everytime I compared AVIF to WEBP there was basically zero size or visual difference and as far as I know AVIF is slower to encode and decode. And I'm not sure yet whether .avif files can be opened natively on Windows, Linux and MacOS on the default image viewers. I think I installed some kind of plugin via the Windows Store at some point to make that work, hard to tell now.
Odd, what are you using to create your avif's? I've done a bunch of work with them and the AVIF's were almost always significantly smaller than webp at equal or better quality.
Encoding is a pain, to be sure; I ended up creating a workflow where my source would save things as PNG files (giant, but lossless) then running a avifenc (https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif) to produce the avif, and trashing the PNG.
Decoding though, all browsers have support, it's great.
Author here: I'm also very much looking forward to using AVIF (and also JPEG XL), but it's another tooling question. I'm really hoping that Pixelmator Pro (now owned by Apple) will support them both soon. Photoshop supports WebP and AVIF, but not through the "Save for Web" or "Export As" flows. Having a nice export flow where you can easily compare compression vs. quality levels is really important to me, and I suspect to many others.
I just switched to AVIF after several years of using WebP. Main reason for me is HDR support, but the smaller encoding is nice. Just beware of lossless AVIF, that's a trap.
In GIMP, when you try to save as a "lossless" AVIF, it will add a lossy colorspace conversion step (to 8 bit YCbCr) unless you specifically specify otherwise. And lossless AVIF always loses to lossless WEBP.
When it comes to animations, is there much of a reason to use avif over webm? I suppose an avif fits into CSS and <img> without further code changes, but that's about it as far as I can think.
> I suppose an avif fits into CSS and <img> without further code changes
Which is HUGE since it allows you to embed them wherever you can embed images. I'm still mad that browser vendors didn't just allow silent looping videos in <img> tags instead of giving us these animated image formats with weirdly gimped non-keyframe compression.
So as every time I read something decrying how webp is allegedly "annoying", the conclusion is that the problem was never about webp itself but the tooling and ecosystem to handle it
Firefox actually silently and automatically converts images to webp in some cases when you Save As them, with no option to revert to the format you see in the DOM. It’s fucking infuriating. I hate webp because the support is so spotty.
This would cause the downloaded file to have incorrect file extension because such services don't configure the Content-Disposition header properly, and you still may have lots of improperly named files unless you realize that the file content doesn't match its extension.
Annoyingly, this doesn't work for a whole lot of websites that insist on serving webp, they just ignore the header. Some of them have bespoke workarounds like adding ?format=original on fandom wikis, with some the server will just never serve you anything other than webp.
To not be annoying the tools don't have to just exist somewhere, they need to be ubiquitous. For example, If I'm looking to upload an image as an avatar on a website, will webp be supported? It's unlikely, even if the site itself might ultimately serve up a webp file. So then I'd have to use a tool to convert it to a more ubiquitous format before uploading it, likely doing a bunch of lossy conversion along the way. That's annoying.
Yeah it's purely the fault of the tens of thousands of application devs that have been too stupid to recognize the obvious and immense benefits of webp over existing widely adopted formats /s
Is there a real distinction? It can be a great format, but if actually using it sucks then in practice it's a pain to use/encounter. (I don't actually have this problem personally - all my apps seem to handle it fine - but the argument seems reasonable.)
Yes, it's important to distinguish annoyances of the codec from annoyances of the ecosystem.
Ecosystem being slow to adopt it is something that can be fixed or improved, but also more importantly (given jpegxl & avif comparisons) are things that will impact any new image format.
Meanwhile annoyances of the codec tend to be things that are dramatically harder to deal with. Like HEIC being a license minefield and also slow as shit. Or that many of these newer image codecs do not have ways to work with them in a memory efficient manner like jpeg does (see eg libjpeg-turbo's sample size & skip scanline options). Or WebP insisted on being in a RIFF container for... uh... absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever afaict. Fortunately RIFF is so trivial that this overhead doesn't actually matter in practice, but then HEIC & AVIF dials up the annoying container bullshit to 11 thanks to their video heritage with ISOBMFF
Perhaps it's a matter of who hits the pain point? Ugly specs make annoyed devs, licensing problems make distributors unhappy, and ecosystem issues leave users unimpressed. (With some spillover between categories, of course.)
well that depends on the size of the image. But a modern cell phone is shooting 50mp+, and at that size you're talking 50-200ms for a jpeg vs. a couple seconds for HEIC. Which is borderline instant-feeling vs. extremely not instant.
HEVC intra is definitely not 10-20x slower than decoding VP8 intra, so something is way off with your numbers. That's on the order of comparing HM at -O0 against an actual VP8 decoder.
It seems much harder to get an audience as someone complaining about technical details of codecs and their implementations, than as someone complaining about the formats (which in practical terms is always going to mean the ecosystem, or really, how broad the support base is or what the user has to do in order to deal with it).
RIFF is so trivial and has such useful properties that I've done several application-specific binary formats that are RIFF with a different start atom.
RIFF itself is fine, but in the context of webp it's pointless. WebP doesn't make any use of being in a riff container. Like it still internally has its own chunk system anyway. So you end up with a single RIFF chunk for the webp file that itself then can contain multiple, non-RIFF chunks
The current WebP Spec RFC9649 defines the format as effectively:
A 'RIFF' chunk containing formtype 'WEBP' and a mandatory 'VP8 ' or 'VP8L' chunk, and optional 'VP8X', 'ICCP','ANIM', 'ANMF', 'EXIF', 'XMP ' chunks and possibly some unknown chunks, where if any of these optional chunks appear 'VP8X' must be first, and with certain ordering restrictions on the chunks.
It is true that earlier spec versions only allowed the core 'VP8 ' or 'VP8L' chunk, and the spec does warn that some older software might not support files with the newer chunks, so they should only be used if really needed for best compatibility.
Absolutely there is. If it works seamlessly for potentially endless end users and the burden is only on the singular you… yeah, it’s worth the extra effort on your part.
nah, life is a trade off between developer effort and the result. There is a reason we don't hand code everything in assembly anymore - it just isn't worth it.
No one is suggesting hand coding a bespoke WebP encoder. FFMPEG is an apt comparison. Using FFMPEG can be annoying, the end user benefits are enormous.
>I don't actually have this problem personally - all my apps seem to handle it fine
I heard this argument against WebP about 3 times, each time I asked people what software exactly do they use that doesn't support WebP, they told me, I checked the support (downloaded the software and opened/edited WebP file), and it did support WebP.
I deemed this "I hate WebP" just a comment bait argument in social networks.
There was a multiple year timespan where webp was being used on websites, but local software (especially image viewers/phone gallery apps) wouldn't render webp. The format's poor reputation is sadly earned.
> I deemed this "I hate WebP" just a comment bait argument in social networks.
Go try adding a webp image to a Google doc and then reconsider your position.
>Go try adding a webp image to a Google doc and then reconsider your position.
Lacking support for WebP or for other common media is a flaw of a specific service.
Many websites accept videos only in mp4 + h264 + aac audio for some reason, while there are many other video formats and codecs which could be used on the web and in general. That doesn't mean the other formats or codecs are worse or annoying.
Ok? You originally said you'd never seen evidence of poor webp compability so you dismissed complaints out of hand. Now you've seen evidence, so you've immediately moved on to a different argument so you can dismiss complaints out of hand.
You have now seen evidence of poor webp compatibility. It exists. The people you said were making it up to bait you into commenting were probably being sincere. That's the entire point of the comment. The end.
I haven't seen missing support of WebP in software I'm using, and also asked people of the software they're using to test it and check for WebP support some months ago.
I was curious because I use WebP pretty extensively for many years, and haven't seen any issues with it.
I don't consider web services to be a software. It's no news that many services don't support wide variety of formats, it's their decision. Missing WebP support is a minor inconvenience compared to other missing features of web services.
The article is about self-hosted website as far as I understand, so it doesn't matter what the external services support or not.
That seems needlessly uncharitable. Isn't the more obvious explanation that they tried using it in a program, hit a failure, cached that result and never retried?
That isn't entirely true. EVs' smaller range, and longer "refueling" time are annoyances by themselves, and compund the annoyance of not having good charging infrastructure.
OTOH, being able to charge while you are sleeping or working is pretty convenient.
I also think people don't consider how EVs are actually used when they think about longer "refueling" times. It's not like you usually bring your EV to a charger and wait for it to charge. You just plug it in at home in the evening and start every day with a charged car.
I've owned EVs for a decade, and I've never actually waited for one to charge.
If you are just commuting or driving around town, then sure. Assuming you have the setup to charge it at home. The inconvenience is when you are traveling longer distances.
> Assuming you have the setup to charge it at home
This feels like another point where people may not think about how this works in the real world. Sure, you may only have a regular plug for your car, but how long does the car stay in the garage? If you work ten hours a day, it's in the garage for 14 hours, which is plenty of time to charge the battery even if you have an hour+ commute and a slow charger.
A gas pump is somewhere on the order of ~30MW.
Even if you account for the greater efficiency of EVs we're still an order of magnitude away from equivalent charging speed.
I haven't seen much if anything saying webp itself is annoying directly. The complaining I've seen is about the tooling available (mainly from non-techies who don't care to know how to convert to another image format because, and I agree, why should they?) that once you've got a webp image file from one site the next site you try to upload it to doesn't accept them. For those of us who can convert the tooling has been there for ages, as have editors happy to load and save the format.
Though TBH I still use JPEG, PNG, or GIF, depending on use case, out of habit. The size saving for the same quality of lossy compression is not something I've found myself hankering for. It is different if you run a site that sends out millions of every image, but nothing I do is that popular and is never likely to be, and no one stuck on a really slow connection where the difference would matter to them is going to be accessing my stuff.
True, but not that rare: some maps for my fav retro games cannot be converted from PNG to WebP because of this limitation. I can slice the images but I still prefer the original appearance and layout.
Apparently Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has a 200MP camera with a 16,320 × 12,240 pixel resolution. So in a few years phones might be able to take pictures which can't be converted to WebP.
This is an issue with most media formats. PNG can be palletized, full-color in four or five different configurations and bit counts, or lossy. You have no idea what's actually inside of a .mkv/.mp4 either. God help you if you try to distinguish between lossy JXL and lossless HDR JXL.
A decoder can and should just do both. A MIME type/extension never really indicated what the contents are like, it just indicated the common restrictions of a file format.
Lossy/lossless is a big detail people want to know upfront. Oh, forgot webp can be animated too, that's even bigger. That gif = animation association made its way into common language.
PNGs can be animated too, APNG uses the same file extension and is rendered by browsers and other tools just fine. GIF can be animated and non-animated. Most modern GIFs are MP4s with bad file extensions. Even JPEG has been hacked into "motion jpeg" (which is a bunch of JPEG files following after each other, decoded as if it's video).
You can't even know if a .bmp is lossy or lossless because of the palletized options and the many different pixel sizes available to the format.
You can usually guess most features for some file formats most of the time, but modern all image file formats have these optional features.
The problem really boils down to WebP having no purpose to exist for any user, therefore no reason to waste time and introduce vulnerabilities for its support, especially for feature-complete software. An image format (actually not, one of those video keyframes formats that have little to do with images, let alone photos, and in its case it's 2-in-1 too with lossless), that was already outperformed by mozjpeg on its initial release as far as human eyes are concerned, and thoroughly obsoleted by jpegli..
The culprit was very often specificially Photoshop. People using old (pirated) copies of Photoshop will still be annoyed about it.
I've also encountered issues with some Linux distros not shipping webp support by default for their image viewers, for some reason, but it's been a while since I've set up a new Linux env so hopefully that's been fixed since.
Google aren't pushing WebP. Google Docs / Slides still don't support it.
I appreciate Google isn't a monolith, but that lack of consistency makes it really hard to shake the impression certain tribes within it are at war with each other.
It's not war, it's indifference. Why should Docs give a damn what Chrome's priorities are? The only reason they would is if there were effective leadership ensuring company-wide alignment, but there is no one filling that function.
Because if they did company wide alignment, you would kill their promotion pipeline. Want harmony? Then in Google you build your own app (see N+1 chat apps) to get that feature, get promoted and dump the project on someone else.
Strangely enough, Google wouldn't index my personal website when I was using webp. Everything in my Search Console showed up as "crawled but not indexed." I had multiple friends with SEO backgrounds check out my site, but everything looked configured correctly.
Just as with JPEG2000, I'm still not convinced the additional complexity is worth it. There seems to be a lot of immature technologies being pushed in the past few years, when IMHO the Web should've stabilised long ago on the basics. But I guess people need things to do to keep them employed... and Big Tech needs to maintain its monopolies.
The old JPG/PNG choice had a big problem: JPG handles sharp edges, including text, badly. PNG produces huge photo files. Images containing a mix of both don't work well in either format.
By contrast, when using a modern format like WEBP or AVIF, a single encoder configuration produces decent looking results across a variety of input images.
Author here: as I wrote in the piece, I've recently dumped Photoshop for Pixelmator Pro. It doesn't currently support AVIF. Photoshop does, but not in a way that makes it easy to optimize an image for web export. JPEG XL is also exciting to me, but it's not generally available across browsers. WebP is the current best image format for my use-case, but I'm hoping others supplant it soon.
>but it's not generally available across browsers.
Note that this is changing rapidly. Safari ships JXL, Chrome did a few days ago, and Firefox will in the next few days. Once this flows through to all the chromium based browsers we will see pretty much 100% support on the web.
The one annoying thing about WebP is that you can no longer see from the file extension whether some image is lossy or lossless.
The other annoying thing is the name, because surprisingly we use images in non-web-related contexts as well. Admittedly, PNG technically has a very similar issue, but it’s less in your face.
It also lost much of its quality advantage over plain jpeg, given the improvements in jpeg encoders: the jpegli encoder (from google's jpegxl team) has improved plain jpeg encoding significantly. Most photo/design apps don't seem to be using SOTA jpeg encoders, though, so I think webp looks better in comparisons like OP's than it actually is. You maintain all the ultra-fast decoding of jpg when you use a modern encoder, too.
People only seem to care about progressive when talking about webp. I suspect most people don't even enable progressive decoding in formats that support it.
https://squoosh.app/editor is a great app to compare how well an image compresses with newer formats like AVIF and WebP, compared to JPG/PNG. It feels much more practical to have a fast loading page with large images now without too much effort, because having to provide fallbacks to older formats before was far too much of a burden.
I was amazed at how much better compression webp offered over jpg and png.
Using it in a web-browser 360 panorama viewer enabled pretty substantial latency and storage improvements.
close to 4x iirc.
ditto large "xray" style orthographic images of building scans generated from pointcloud laser scan data.
avif was even better compression for some cases, but seems to take a long time to generate, and less widespread browser support. Will look at jpeg-XL .. but Im guessing it will be a while until it has widespread support
It's typically 15%-30% smaller than JPEG at comparable perceptual quality. Any reduction bigger than that is just loss of quality without further compression improvement, and you could have similarly reduced file sizes by recompressing/optimizing JPEG.
In JPEG file size grows exponentially with quality, which also means that "I can't tell the difference" decrease in JPEG quality makes a huge difference in file sizes.
For the past two years, I have been exporting my images in WebP instead of JPG. If I share it online or send it by an email, I am pretty sure the other side will be able to see them.
I honestly think that all phones and even professional cameras should replace JPG with WEBP, we will have like 30% smaller photos.
The DNG format (for raw photos) allows JPEG XL compression (it used to allow only JPEG in the past). I wish some country made it mandatory for cameras to let user take photos in DNG (just like USB-C is mandatory in the EU).
I am happy that HEIC from Apple did not take off (as it was proprietary, protected by patents).
I use webp on my blog a lot. The software automatically converts it when I post and so on. Surprisingly small files and I've never had any trouble opening them on any platform. Big fan.
I love webp. I founded one of the mid 2010's "photo backup and rediscovery" startups. Webp let us offer free unlimited photo backup at the iPhone resolution of the time (iPhone 6: 8MP). We hosted billions of photos for free, and paid for it all with a sub 1% conversion rate to $5 a month for untouched jpegs. It was profitable. We had to have a few dozen auto-scaling image conversion servers for browsers that didn't support webp, but 95% of users used our apps which supported webp, so it was fine.
I'd probably go avif/jpegxl today, but webp was ahead of it's time.
There are two different codecs both called "webp". There's the lossy VP8 codec, and the lossless codec that's completely different. Lossless WebP is so good that outside of image format support, there's no reason to use anything older (except for very specific kinds of repetitive images).
Meanwhile, JPEG-LI is literally JPEG, just with different rules for how the image is decoded in order to support higher color resolution. (And different rules during encoding to allocate bits differently, usually boosting the bitrate of luma and cutting the bitrate of chroma)
Ok, but do we _need_ WebP after all in this day and age?
Globally seen connections get faster and storage gets cheaper and we have huge amounts of tools for dealing with PNG and JPEG, so what's the deal?
Sure, use images wisely, compress them accordingly, deliver images in the right size, that's all important stuff, but you have to do that with WebP, too.
So after all those years, I don't think WebP is really solving a problem that needed solving or am I missing something?
You're asking why can't we be wasteful for wastefulness sake, even though most people access internet these days on battery powered devices using wireless radios which burn power when transferring said data?
This seems to be a static website managed with Jekyll. I've never used it, but I'd be surprised if there isn't a way to automatically convert images to different formats.
I'm assuming it would take a bit longer to deploy the site and having 2 or 3 different versions of the same image would use more space, but it shouldn't be hard that hard to use AVIF, even if Pixelmator doesn't support it at the moment. It would also ensure that those with older browsers can still view the image, something that won't happen if we only have AVIF or WebP.
WebP have been in use for many years. It's good for still pictures, but its animation capabilities are very limited, because it's based on a much simplified subset of VP8 video codec.
AVIF on the contrary has great animation support. It's essentially a AV1 video without sound, but with all the benefits of <img> browser tag.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 68.7 ms ] threadMany image links that work for search engines don't work for the site and I have to download and then upload to a host to get an embeddable image link.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/siat/
Especially for animated images. Comparing webp or avif sizes to gif is easily a factor of five to ten when animated.
Encoding is a pain, to be sure; I ended up creating a workflow where my source would save things as PNG files (giant, but lossless) then running a avifenc (https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif) to produce the avif, and trashing the PNG.
Decoding though, all browsers have support, it's great.
I don't delete my original source images, in case if I want to change the encoder parameters later, or if a newer encoder version improves quality.
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/jpeg-xl-in-chrome
Which is HUGE since it allows you to embed them wherever you can embed images. I'm still mad that browser vendors didn't just allow silent looping videos in <img> tags instead of giving us these animated image formats with weirdly gimped non-keyframe compression.
Ecosystem being slow to adopt it is something that can be fixed or improved, but also more importantly (given jpegxl & avif comparisons) are things that will impact any new image format.
Meanwhile annoyances of the codec tend to be things that are dramatically harder to deal with. Like HEIC being a license minefield and also slow as shit. Or that many of these newer image codecs do not have ways to work with them in a memory efficient manner like jpeg does (see eg libjpeg-turbo's sample size & skip scanline options). Or WebP insisted on being in a RIFF container for... uh... absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever afaict. Fortunately RIFF is so trivial that this overhead doesn't actually matter in practice, but then HEIC & AVIF dials up the annoying container bullshit to 11 thanks to their video heritage with ISOBMFF
How much slower? I'm finding very conflicting numbers.
But on the timescale of "wow this still doesn't support webp" those patents will solve themselves soon.
software-decoded HEIC is around 100x slower than JPEG.
WebP is something like 20-50% slower than JPEG, so still solidly an order of magnitude faster than best case hardware-accelerated HEIC decoding.
A 'RIFF' chunk containing formtype 'WEBP' and a mandatory 'VP8 ' or 'VP8L' chunk, and optional 'VP8X', 'ICCP','ANIM', 'ANMF', 'EXIF', 'XMP ' chunks and possibly some unknown chunks, where if any of these optional chunks appear 'VP8X' must be first, and with certain ordering restrictions on the chunks.
It is true that earlier spec versions only allowed the core 'VP8 ' or 'VP8L' chunk, and the spec does warn that some older software might not support files with the newer chunks, so they should only be used if really needed for best compatibility.
So no actually we very much do, because sometimes it is worth it.
I heard this argument against WebP about 3 times, each time I asked people what software exactly do they use that doesn't support WebP, they told me, I checked the support (downloaded the software and opened/edited WebP file), and it did support WebP.
I deemed this "I hate WebP" just a comment bait argument in social networks.
> I deemed this "I hate WebP" just a comment bait argument in social networks.
Go try adding a webp image to a Google doc and then reconsider your position.
Lacking support for WebP or for other common media is a flaw of a specific service.
Many websites accept videos only in mp4 + h264 + aac audio for some reason, while there are many other video formats and codecs which could be used on the web and in general. That doesn't mean the other formats or codecs are worse or annoying.
You have now seen evidence of poor webp compatibility. It exists. The people you said were making it up to bait you into commenting were probably being sincere. That's the entire point of the comment. The end.
I was curious because I use WebP pretty extensively for many years, and haven't seen any issues with it.
I don't consider web services to be a software. It's no news that many services don't support wide variety of formats, it's their decision. Missing WebP support is a minor inconvenience compared to other missing features of web services.
The article is about self-hosted website as far as I understand, so it doesn't matter what the external services support or not.
That is true in life.
EVs aren’t annoying, the charging infrastructure is.
Etc
OTOH, being able to charge while you are sleeping or working is pretty convenient.
Alternatively, my buddies EV does 700km to a charge. I’m not driving 7 hours straight without a good break.
I've owned EVs for a decade, and I've never actually waited for one to charge.
This feels like another point where people may not think about how this works in the real world. Sure, you may only have a regular plug for your car, but how long does the car stay in the garage? If you work ten hours a day, it's in the garage for 14 hours, which is plenty of time to charge the battery even if you have an hour+ commute and a slow charger.
Both times I absolutely did notice the slow "refueling" times, but for 95% of my driving "around town" it is _so_ nice.
Even going as fast as I can on a small car (45l tank), it takes about 6 minutes.
BYD flash charging is very close to that.
Though TBH I still use JPEG, PNG, or GIF, depending on use case, out of habit. The size saving for the same quality of lossy compression is not something I've found myself hankering for. It is different if you run a site that sends out millions of every image, but nothing I do is that popular and is never likely to be, and no one stuck on a really slow connection where the difference would matter to them is going to be accessing my stuff.
A decoder can and should just do both. A MIME type/extension never really indicated what the contents are like, it just indicated the common restrictions of a file format.
You can't even know if a .bmp is lossy or lossless because of the palletized options and the many different pixel sizes available to the format.
You can usually guess most features for some file formats most of the time, but modern all image file formats have these optional features.
I've also encountered issues with some Linux distros not shipping webp support by default for their image viewers, for some reason, but it's been a while since I've set up a new Linux env so hopefully that's been fixed since.
I appreciate Google isn't a monolith, but that lack of consistency makes it really hard to shake the impression certain tribes within it are at war with each other.
https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...
Contrast this to, say, Apple - which when decides to push something, they go all in. And that's an example of top-down decision making.
Switching all my images back to jpg solved it
By contrast, when using a modern format like WEBP or AVIF, a single encoder configuration produces decent looking results across a variety of input images.
Go straight to jpeg xl and/or avif when the they are mature.
Note that this is changing rapidly. Safari ships JXL, Chrome did a few days ago, and Firefox will in the next few days. Once this flows through to all the chromium based browsers we will see pretty much 100% support on the web.
The other annoying thing is the name, because surprisingly we use images in non-web-related contexts as well. Admittedly, PNG technically has a very similar issue, but it’s less in your face.
I speculate the asymmetric push is a case of it solving Google’s problem (bandwidth cost) but not the end user’s problems (battery and latency).
Using it in a web-browser 360 panorama viewer enabled pretty substantial latency and storage improvements.
close to 4x iirc.
ditto large "xray" style orthographic images of building scans generated from pointcloud laser scan data.
avif was even better compression for some cases, but seems to take a long time to generate, and less widespread browser support. Will look at jpeg-XL .. but Im guessing it will be a while until it has widespread support
In JPEG file size grows exponentially with quality, which also means that "I can't tell the difference" decrease in JPEG quality makes a huge difference in file sizes.
I honestly think that all phones and even professional cameras should replace JPG with WEBP, we will have like 30% smaller photos.
The DNG format (for raw photos) allows JPEG XL compression (it used to allow only JPEG in the past). I wish some country made it mandatory for cameras to let user take photos in DNG (just like USB-C is mandatory in the EU).
I am happy that HEIC from Apple did not take off (as it was proprietary, protected by patents).
I'd probably go avif/jpegxl today, but webp was ahead of it's time.
I remember moving on to PNG when that was implemented in most browsers and suddenly you could do gradients that end in transparency...
Globally seen connections get faster and storage gets cheaper and we have huge amounts of tools for dealing with PNG and JPEG, so what's the deal?
Sure, use images wisely, compress them accordingly, deliver images in the right size, that's all important stuff, but you have to do that with WebP, too.
So after all those years, I don't think WebP is really solving a problem that needed solving or am I missing something?
I mean really, really long. Hard lessons learned
> I’m wondering if/when newer standards like ... AVIF will be supported by Pixelmator Pro.
I'm assuming it would take a bit longer to deploy the site and having 2 or 3 different versions of the same image would use more space, but it shouldn't be hard that hard to use AVIF, even if Pixelmator doesn't support it at the moment. It would also ensure that those with older browsers can still view the image, something that won't happen if we only have AVIF or WebP.
AVIF on the contrary has great animation support. It's essentially a AV1 video without sound, but with all the benefits of <img> browser tag.
https://files.catbox.moe/blnad2.avif (334 KB, 35 seconds, 352×352 18 fps)