Hacker News Reader

Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

From what I've seen WebP is probably the strongest contender for a JPEG replacement. It's pretty common in the indie game scene for example to re-encode a JPEG game to WebP for better image quality and often a significant (25% or more) savings on installer size. Support is coming, albeit somewhat slowly. It was pretty bad in Ubuntu 22, but several apps have added support in Ubuntu 24. Windows 11 supports WebP in Photos and Paint for another example.

View on HN

I hate webp. Not for any legitimate technical reason like, but I often just want to download an image from the web for an image board or drop it in a diagram or ppt or for a joke and nothing works with that format. Nothing. Google image search is useless because of it.

Cmd+shift+4 is now the only way to grab an image out of a browser. Which is annoying.

It has made my life needlessly more complicated. I wish it would go away.

Maybe if browsers auto converted when you dragged ann image out of the browser window I wouldn’t care, but when I see webp… I hate.

Often (in my experience) WebP is served as a bait-and-switch even if the link ends with .jpg. So I use Curl to fetch the file, and since Curl doesn't send "Accept: image/webp" unless you tell it to, the server just gives you what you ask for.

I once edited Firefox config to make it pretend to not support WebP, and the only site that broke was YouTube.

lol I installed the firefox extension "Don't Accept image/webp" but I assume a lot of sites just ignore it

Webp images are right up there with the fake transparent PNGs you come across in Google Images.

My working model is that WebP images are generally a lossy copy of a PNG or a generation-loss transcoding of a JPG image. I know that lossless WebP technically exists but nobody uses it when they're trying to save bandwidth at the cost of the user.

Even if webp got better support later, I want it deprecated just as revenge for previously wasting my time.

That's true of any new format. Until everything supports it it's not so great. iPhone saves .HEIC which I have to convert to something else to be useful. It's not everywhere (not sure it ever will be).

Windows didn't use to show .jpgs in the window explorer. I know becase I wrote a tool to generate thumbnail HTML pages to include on archive CDs of photos.

To solve this problem, some format has to "win" and get adopted everywhere. That format could be webp, but it will take 3-10 years before everything supports it. It's not just the OS showing it in it's file viewer. It's it's preview app supporting it. It's every web site that lets you upload an image (gmail/gmaps/gchat/facebook/discord/messenger/slack/your bank/apartment-rental-companies, etc..etc..etc..) I just takes forever to get everyone to upgrade.

When does a format stop being new? WebP was introduced fifteen years ago.

When it's widely adopted.

WebP gets pushed into your series of tubes without your consent, and the browser that you're most likely to use to view them just happens to be made by the same company that invented the codec. It's DivX and Real Media all over again.

Worst case you can open it up in Paint and save as JPEG.

Also, I just checked and Powerpoint has no problem dropping in a webp image. Gimp opens it just fine. You are right that web forums are often well behind the times on this.

Worst case you can open it up in Paint and save as JPEG

If he's using ⌘⇧4 to take a screenshot, he probably isn't going to open it in Microsoft Paint.

Total agreement from me, I use this:

bin/webp2png:

    #!/bin/bash
    dwebp "$1" -o  "${1%%.webp}".png

I use ThumbsUp a free utility from https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware to convert webp/heic or whatever inconvenient format.

Just drop the offending image onto the icon in the dock.

On the classic macs they’re was a program called DropDisk. You could drag a disk image to it and it auto mounted it. That suggests a tool for you. Make a desktop app that you can drag and drop images on that converts them to jpeg and saves them in a folder.

You can create this using Automator in a minute.

thumbsup app does exactly this.

If you want to do that so badly and hate webp so much, why not screenshot it? Then you don't have to care what format it's in on the browser

Photoshop has native WebP support now too!

Pretty sure I've managed to configure my Firefoxes to act as webp does not exist...

It's a constant battle though to keep those browser extensions updated, especially since Google decided that extensions cut into their profits and they essentially made them useless.

Exactly, part of being a "superior format" is adoption. Until then, it's just another in a sea of potential.

> It's pretty common in the indie game scene

That's such a weak argument. If I was an indie game developer, I would use whatever obscure format would offer me the most benefit, since I control the pipeline from the beginning (raw TIFF/TGA/PNG/... files) to the end (the game that needs to have a decoder and will uncompress it into GPU memory). 20 minutes extra build-time on the dev machine is irrelevant when I can save hundreds of MBs.

However, that is not the benchmark for a format widely used on the internet. Encoding times multiply, as does the need to search for specialized software, and literally everyone else needs to support the format to be able to view those files.

Also webp support in browsers is looking pretty good these days: https://caniuse.com/webp

The last major browser to add support was Safari 16 and that was released on September 12, 2022. I see pretty much no one on browsers older than Safari 16.4 in metrics on websites I run.

People want to use images outside of browsers too.

What apps are you using in 2025 that handle images but doesn't support webp?

I can't think of any on my Fedora desktop for instance.

Lots of websites that expect me to upload images only accept jpeg and png.

Another one I recently interacted with are video backgrounds for zoom. Those apparently can only be jpeg, not even png

Luminar Neo, for example, doesn't handle webp. And there's more than just Fedora, IIRC.

Yeah, after seeing the logs I made the switch to webp earlier this year. As much as I hate to admit it (not a fan of Google), it’s a pretty big bandwidth savings for the same (or better) quality.

I switched to webp on my forum for avatars and other user image uploads.

With one format you get decent filesize, transparency, and animation which makes things much simpler than doing things like conditionally producing gifs vs jpegs.

.. or you can go directly to avif - https://caniuse.com/avif (93%) instead of webp (95% support).

I'd love to see a comparison of the computational expense of avif compared to webp. I know av1, which avif is based off, is pretty hard on the hardware.

https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front

See various charts. For example, this table:

https://res.cloudinary.com/cloudinary-marketing/images/f_aut...

For decoding,

Webp - ~70Mpx/s,

jpeg - 100 to 300 Mpx/s

Jpeg xl - 115 to 163

Avif (single thread) - 32 to 37

Avif (multithread) - 90 to 110

FWIW, the day I discovered jpegli[1] I left WebP behind. Similar sizes to WebP while maintaining JPEG compatibility.

1: https://github.com/google/jpegli

Reply on news.ycombinator.com