Ask HN: Why aren't more apps using WebP format? WebP has been around for a while now, offering better compression and performance over JPEG and PNG. So why haven't more apps fully adopted it yet? Are there hidden compatibility issues, performance downsides, or just inertia in the industry? Curious to hear if the switch to WebP has made a difference for anyone here, especially for mobile performance. |
Neither offered a big enough improvement for end-users to care.* Cloud operators did care, and Imgix and Cloudinary can automatically transform older formats to WebP or AVIF, for example: https://docs.imgix.com/en-US/getting-started/tutorials/perfo... and https://cloudinary.com/documentation/image_optimization#auto...
There are also a bunch of Wordpress extensions that can do the same, and FOSS proxies too.
* Hell, you think PNGs are bad? We still use animated GIFs and MP3s, even though both are terrible by today's efficiency standards. Sometimes good enough is good enough.
So, at least for me, it's 99% inertia.
HEIC don’t display in browsers. Or maybe they do now but I haven’t checked lol. AVIF don’t work well in iOS messages for example. If you send someone an AVIF it asks you to download it. WEBP works just fine, like you’d expect any image to show up.
I used to convert any non JPEG image to JPEG.
Nowadays I convert any non WEBP image to WEBP.
My B2B saas has a file explorer functionally in it. Any image for display is served as WEBP, and it is converted after upload. The WEBP files are like 20-90% smaller than what the user uploaded. Of course, the user can download and I give them their original file back.
AWS charges me for bandwidth which is more expensive than storage. Most users upload images and view them (open it up in viewer) maybe twice. But they will scroll a lot more and when the explorer opens in grid they can see anywhere from a dozen to 40 images. A small amount will download the original again.
WEBP is used by a lot of non-Google companies. Notion, for example converts images to webp.
Optimized JPG images are tiny, and will load fast on any device. Any web designer worth their salt must know how to make a performant site without needing WebP images.
Chrome had support for WebP pretty early, because Google, but caniuse.com says 2018 for Edge, 2019 for Firefox and 2020 for Safari. There's a lot of potential software out there that works in a post-2016 timeframe, but not with WebP.
Also many people forget about JPE, which is rare, but I've had problems with it, its basically a DOS format for JPEG, and alternative for JPG
I thought that was mainly true in the Apple world. Does that apply to Windows and Linux too? (As in, I thought many browsers implement their own codecs)