Pejo
Gold Member
First of all, what is .webp?
From wikipedia:
I suppose its nice that its compression provides better/similar quality to .png and .jpg at smaller file sizes, and it's also nice that it supports transparency and animation.
HOWEVER.
It also isn't universally supported, most notably for embedding/uploading images *cough* GAF *cough* and even in Windows operating systems' default "photos" app, depending on your current version.
It appears that Google has been trying to force this format for a while now, and certain CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) will automatically serve you .webps instead of .jpgs and .pngs despite the old file extension being listed on the sites. Most notably, Akamai CDNs have been using this funcitonality for a while now.
You can see examples of this happening on literally any wikia page.
From the URL of this image of Link:
Right clicking the image, going to "Save image as...":
Also of note, if you just rename and select a different filetype in this step, it still encodes/compresses the image as a .webp and will still not be uploadable on sites such as *cough* GAF *cough*, even though it has a .jpg/.png file extension.
It's more of an annoyance to me than anything. If the format becomes universally accepted and usable everywhere, I think it will be less of an issue. I have downloaded a Chromium-based browser extension in the meantime that allows me to specify the format of the image while saving, but it's also an extra step to use that I didn't really want to have to deal with.
Anyways, what do you guys think of this?
From wikipedia:
I suppose its nice that its compression provides better/similar quality to .png and .jpg at smaller file sizes, and it's also nice that it supports transparency and animation.
HOWEVER.
It also isn't universally supported, most notably for embedding/uploading images *cough* GAF *cough* and even in Windows operating systems' default "photos" app, depending on your current version.
It appears that Google has been trying to force this format for a while now, and certain CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) will automatically serve you .webps instead of .jpgs and .pngs despite the old file extension being listed on the sites. Most notably, Akamai CDNs have been using this funcitonality for a while now.
You can see examples of this happening on literally any wikia page.
From the URL of this image of Link:
Right clicking the image, going to "Save image as...":
Also of note, if you just rename and select a different filetype in this step, it still encodes/compresses the image as a .webp and will still not be uploadable on sites such as *cough* GAF *cough*, even though it has a .jpg/.png file extension.
It's more of an annoyance to me than anything. If the format becomes universally accepted and usable everywhere, I think it will be less of an issue. I have downloaded a Chromium-based browser extension in the meantime that allows me to specify the format of the image while saving, but it's also an extra step to use that I didn't really want to have to deal with.
Anyways, what do you guys think of this?
