this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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What’s webp and why should I care?
WebP is a raster graphics file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency. Google announced the WebP format in September 2010, and released the first stable version of its supporting library in April 2018.
The format has spotty support across applications and some vulnerabilities were discovered that required patch efforts last year. It's not clear why you should do anything.
I don’t want to help Google control yet another aspect of the internet.
What's there to control? It's a completely open format. No royalties, no control, nothing.
Google’s image format
It’s smaller than png which a company that shows images really likes because it’s cheaper so to force adoption they convert a bunch of images to .webp on google images
The problem is that 1. It hadn’t been adapted anywhere so people would have to convert it back to png to use 2. It is worse in every aspect to jxl files so Google has had to block the adaptation of jxl on the web as much as they can (jxl retains more quality and is half the size of webp)
Currently only webkit browsers support jxl out of the box. Firefox has had it in their nightly builds for years now but have never moved it into standard
If Google wants to push webp because it is smaller than previous formats, and jxl is even smaller than that, why would Google have an interst in blocking jxl?
Not saying Google did not or does not block jxl, just your chain of logic as to why they do that does not make sense to me.
Because it’s not theirs
It doesn’t make sense which is why people believe Google has ulterior motives. I haven’t seen any real reason not to use jxl as the new format; but I also haven’t looked that far into it. ¯\(ツ)/¯
JXL is new (like 2 years old), webp is older (> 10 years). Adding support for a thing takes time and resources, which is lower priority when there are good-enough formats already supported.
At least that's my perspective as someone who interacts with product owners (i.e. the type of people deciding what features get prioritized).
Why should I help Google saturate the internet with yet some else they control?
Foss users should start making jxl only websites just to fuck chrome users and google.