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Comment by phoenixdblack | Hacker News Reader

I'm completely with you on that. WebP should be the smallest, best supported solution right now.

WebP is a terrible practice and and it has no real value vs jpg https://pagepipe.com/dont-use-webp-image-format/ - just because endorsed by google doesn't mean it's good (i would even argue, the contrary is true)

> Cloudinary says we can reduce that image’s page weight from a 4.6k PNG to a 1.5k webP image. That saves 3.1k. In big letters, they tell us that is a 32-percent savings.

I'm not a mathematician but...

If we're comparing lossy compression mode, WebP is close to equal to MozJPEG for higher res images. Check the 1500 px comparison: https://siipo.la/blog/is-webp-really-better-than-jpeg

This page says that webp produces smaller images…

This article seems outdated. Webp supported on Safari. Also this article itself confirms that webp saves image size, just author for some reason thinks that it does not matter. Well, this page is not so fast to open for me, definitely not 0.5 second, more like 5 seconds, so I wouldn't be the one listening to his advices.

> Well, this page is not so fast to open for me, definitely not 0.5 second, more like 5 seconds, so I wouldn't be the one listening to his advices.

its hosted on a raspberry pi and is front page of HN...

I'm pretty sure the parent poster is talking about the page that says you shouldn't use Webp, not about low-tech machazine. The former claims to load in 0.5 seconds, the latter doesn't.

doh! I hate it when i end up viewing threads out of context :/

> This article seems outdated.

Amazingly enough the page seems to be updated very recently ("November 2021", which was not present back in March [1]).

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210305192950/https://pagepipe....

their argument is that filesize doesnt matter because images download in parallel... thats just idiotic. 10x 100MB images downloading in parallel is still going to take longer than 10x 1kB

Just use AVIF with a JPEG fallback...

AVIF is still in process of adoption [1], while WebP is virtually everywhere and you can even ignore fallbacks if you don't support MSIE [2].

Also while AVIF supports lossless images, its lossless compression is known to be weak and can be even inferior to PNG, while the WebP lossless mode is a dedicated algorithm and almost guaranteed to be better than PNG. This is a reason why JPEG XL can be better than AVIF in the long term, where AVIF is just another intra-frame format extracted from video codecs while JPEG XL is explicitly built to support both use cases.

[1] https://caniuse.com/avif

[2] https://caniuse.com/webp

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