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Comment by Gualdrapo | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.)

> Like HEIC being a license minefield and also slow as shit.

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.

hardware-decoded HEIC is around 10x slower than JPEG.

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.

How slow are we talking though? 10x slower than instant and not noticeable for the average use case? Dog slow and everyone will always notice?

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.

cough FFMPEG, cryptography…

So no actually we very much do, because sometimes it is worth it.

sure, but we don't hand-code everything.

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.

well yes, my point was its a trade off...

It matters. The ecosystem by itself could be fixable. But a bad ecosystem could also be a symptom of a bad standard, for example IPv6.

>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?

I haven't seen much if anything saying webp itself is annoying directly, and your conclusion agrees with what I've seen. 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.

It's still annoying that if you set quality anywhere below 100, you get half-resolution color (VP8 only has 4:2:0 chroma subsampling).

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..

It has transparency support, unlike JPEG.

I use it in comic archive storage locally. I convert jpg's to WebP's in cbz's. Saves me storage space.

The fact that there is a size limit (16,383 x 16,383 pixels) is still annoying for some (rare) use cases.

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.

> the conclusion is that the problem was never about webp itself but the tooling and ecosystem to handle it

That is true in life.

EVs aren’t annoying, the charging infrastructure is.

Etc

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.

BYD flash charging is as fast as a gas pump.

Alternatively, my buddies EV does 700km to a charge. I’m not driving 7 hours straight without a good break.

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.

IME pro-EV people will say "L1 is all you need" but then motte-and-bailey and insist having an L2 is essential for cold winters...

We have snow half the year. The car goes about 20% less far. That's all.

Less about range (though mine is ~30% hit) and more about a 120V socket not being able to heat the battery to charge effectively in sub-zero temps.

Hm, yeah. Mine is in a garage.

Not everyone has a garage with power at all to park their car in.

For a while, I charged my car with a long cable coming out of my second-story flat window

That sounds pretty annoying to me. And probably violates HOA covenants or apartment rules in a lot of places.

After owning an EV for a year I have only truly needed to charge at a fast charger on two trips.

Both times I absolutely did notice the slow "refueling" times, but for 95% of my driving "around town" it is _so_ nice.

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.

The theoretical amount of energy transferred is irrelevant. All that matters is how long it takes to ”refill” the car.

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.

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.

It's annoying how the format itself, or should I say just the file extension, doesn't make it clear whether or not you have lossy compression.

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.

Nobody uses APNG though. Maybe they would if it had a distinct file extension. There is non-animated GIF, but it's super rare because why.

And only some software. All my Linux software supports it and have been for ages.

Does Windows already display WebP files in File Explorer? :-|

It has done for some years

Yes. https://imgur.com/a/lRSM128

Windows 10's support isn't out of the box. You need to install an explorer extension, and even then it's a bit shaky.

I personally avoid webp because of the tooling/compatibility issues.

Windows 10 support went EOL one year ago. It is an archaic operating system, so no doubt, it does not support modern technology out-of-the-box. Nevertheless, it can be modified to add such support with trivial effort.

> It is an archaic operating system

Do you have a reliable source you can share which supports that claim?

Per Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...

Windows 10 is over 10 years old now

How is that "archaic"?

> Windows 10 support went EOL

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-of-support

We must have extremely different definitions of the word "archaic".

Windows 10 support is out of the box, I explicitly checked that in one of "I hate WebP" argument

>I've opened both .webp and .avif on Windows 10 22H2 in Standard MS "Photos", "MS Paint", "Paint 3D" applications before posting the previous message.

>Just tested in older Windows 10 21H2, and yes, in this version Paint doens't open webp

> the tooling and ecosystem to handle it

That’s the whole point, though. If the tools I use don’t handle it properly, it’s annoying. Saying it’s an ecosystem problem doesn’t change that.

How long has it been now? And from what I’ve seen, even Google’s own stuff doesn’t always handle it. That’s not helping their case.

Well, that's a problem with the tools you are using. Tools to work with webp have existed for a long time.

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

When said application charges an exorbitant monthly fee, and is owned by a multibillion company, yeah it *is* pretty ridiculous.

Sure but there are also so many small open source projects that work with images too.

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.

I don't think that's firefox doing it? I'd guess it's some CDNs doing the conversion. Or the URL says .jpg but when you look at the mimetype sent by the server it's actually webp. Extentions are meaningless for browsers.

I highly doubt that is what's happening. More likely the server is serving a webp under a .png filename or something.

I have observed the behavior you suspect many times.

It's not Firefox, it's the server. Edit and resend the request with header "Accept: image/jpeg" only and you'll most likely get a JPEG file.

Does it actually request the image that it already downloaded again to save it to a file? Seems rather silly?

No, the server is just sending the file named 'foo.jpg', but encoded as a webp with webp mime type, so when you save the file it defaults to the webp extension cause it ends up treating the filename as a blob of text without an expected extension for the file type.

No, this is not what’s happening. Or at least not the phenomenon I am discussing.

That seems more likely. I still hate webp.

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.

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