just went to look up the status of webp images in mastodon
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/11589
turns out support was removed two years ago
@KayFaraday I wish someone did that to Firefox for me 😋
I know I can disable it with about:config var, but I know the code is still there.
@m0xee why would you disable it
@KayFaraday I unconditionally hate everything Google that's my thing 😅
I wish WebP would just cease to exist, together with WebM, VP9, http/2, http/3, etc.
You won't believe the lengths I went to get rid of WebP on my Void boxes, I have half the templates for imaging-related software patched and build the packages myself. It's not that easy with Firefox as it doesn't use libwebp and has its own implementation.
@KayFaraday I admit, It does have superior compression, but not a game changer, I think it's 10% better on average. I mean I get why Google is interested in it, for them 10% is a lot if they save on that bandwidth, but for everyone else it's not that obvious.
And it hinders the development of new browsers — if it's not based on already existing engines, because once it's universally excepted you have to support it — one more thing to implement 🤷
@m0xee try comparing the size of the original image of this https://imgur.io/a/qUjz3FW in webp vs png
@KayFaraday
"Oops! We couldn't find that page"
Broken link?
@m0xee huh it works for me
@KayFaraday
Huh 🤔
I thought maybe Privacy Possum or uBO might have caused it, but I tried disabling both — still doesn't load.
Well, anyway, maybe using lossless codec like PNG doesn't make sense in case with that image? AFAIK WebP offers both — lossless and lossy. When WebP uses lossy compression it makes sense comparing it to JPEG. When I said 10% I meant and average webpage with several images, comparing particular images head-to-head might be different, there always are corner cases.
@m0xee I think the WebP lossy is the best bet there because JPEG would create fuzzies along the distinct lines (which that image has a lot of) and the PNG of that image is on the order of tens of megabytes
@KayFaraday Well, don't get me wrong, I don't think that WebP is good for nothing, it does have its uses. So does JPEG2000, JPEG XL and several codecs based on PNG. Should all web browsers support all of these? I think it's a bad idea. It doesn't do something completely new like SVG, it's not significantly better like h265 vs h264, it does what was already possible and only marginally better. It's not enough to become the new de-facto standard — that's my opinion.
@KayFaraday In fact that's what I hate about Google. They develop some thing and want everyone to support it, they develop the next thing that's marginally better and want everyone to support that. That's what turned modern web browsers into monstrosities they are and made web a mess.
Like… brotli — who needs this thing, who asked for it? 😩
@KayFaraday
> there always are corner cases
For example, I've seen with my own eyes several YouTube videos, where VP9 (YT format 248) stream's size was bigger than h264 (YT format 137), but it doesn't mean that h264 is better, in fact it's the opposite, VP9 is better on average.
But only marginally so. So I still hate it 😅
@KayFaraday
> I unconditionally hate everything Google
Well, except for Go maybe. I really like the language and I respect Rob Pike, but I hate that it's reliant on Google infrastructure and I don't like the direction they are taking with the language as a whole.
@m0xee it's a good codec though