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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> I've noticed the same issue with WebP and have gone back to JPG/PNG for most things (jpg for photos, png for UI-type images)

Wait... I agree for JPG but if you use lossless WEBP instead of PNG, isn't it simply the same pixels, just with a file about 30% smaller than the corresponding PNG file? (and 15% smaller compared to already heavily optimized PNG files like when using zopfli/optipng/etc.).

Isn't the "lossless" in "lossless WEBP" actually lossless when converting a PNG file to WEBP?

FWIW when you convert losslessly a PNG to WEBP, then decompress the WEBP back to a PNG file, then convert again that PNG back to a WEBP file, you get the exact same lossless WEBP file. It's also the same WEBP you get when you encode losslessly from either a PNG or that same PNG but "crushed" with a PNG optimizer.

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Yeah but I just don't fw webp and other weird formats. JPEG and PNG are tried and true, also it's nice how the extension indicates lossiness.

On the technical side, webp support still isn't like png. Tried dragging a webp into Google Slides just now, got "unsupported image type," which is ironic. I'll try again in like 10 years.

> On the technical side, webp support still isn't like png.

Oh that's a good point.

I see lossless WEBP mostly as a way to save bandwith where PNG would have been used. If you've got a pipeline where, anyway, you already "crush" your PNG file, you may as well also generate a lossless WEBP file and serve that: all browsers support it. And you can fall back on the optimized PNG should the browser not support WEBP.

I mean: I use WEBP, but only lossless WEBP, as a replacement for PNG when I'd serve PNG files to browsers.

But for that one usecase: showing a PNG file in a webpage, I don't see that many downsides to lossless WEBP. It saves bandwith.

Only if you can accurately detect browser support and serve the PNG instead, which means added complexity. And you have to store both.

Also, if users download your images and use them elsewhere, webp will still be more annoying for them. Though it's not very common that you want them doing that anyway.

https://caniuse.com/webp

Any updated (modern) browser should be able to see webp just fine, I'd rather just serve it without a backup plan if I'm planning to have webp in my website.

The browser support for webp is fine, problem is everything else. If you only care about displaying the images (not letting people use them elsewhere), you only use lossless webp, and all your backend infra supports it, then sure.

At this point in my life, I just don't have time. I basically use either mp4 or PNG for all web "images/animation" when doing web pages. I don't detect browsers or the like. Unless there is some revolutionary new image/video tech, I'll stick with them for the foreseeable future. I only bother with JPEG when it's straight from the phone/camera and I don't want any reduction in quality from the original high rez.

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