> and the abysmal everyday use it gets
Estimates are that 95% of Internet users have a browser that supports WebP and that ~25% of the top million websites serve WebP images. I wouldn't call that abysmal.
Estimates are that 95% of Internet users have a browser that supports WebP and that ~25% of the top million websites serve WebP images. I wouldn't call that abysmal.
One example is Sony's SRF camera raw format.
Programs like Photoshop and Affinity have to bring their own decoders where previously none were required.
Having ask that in a slightly confrontational way, one of the reasons I started using VLC all those years ago, and still use it to this day, was having trouble with other media players that relied on OS support fail to work well (or at all) with some codecs, while VLC brought support for them, and their dog, built-in and reliable. Dragging your own format support libraries with you can be beneficial.
It doesn't matter if the alternative is technically superior once the majority use the mainstream thing.
There are so many uneven areas of Reddit where WebP doesn't work. Old reddit, profile support, mod tools, etc.
My webcrawler sucks down a lot of WebP images, at least it did before it got the smackdown from Cloudflare.
Hell, for some software features (like stickers in some chat apps), WebP is mandatory.
HEIFF files, on the other hand...
Photoshop still won’t open it, MacOS preview opens it but then demands to convert it to tiff when you try to edit it
We used to do this with JPEG, in fact. And that's why many pictures on Facebook from pre-2018 or so all have a distinctive grainy look. It's artifacts on top of artifacts. Storage on phones isn't tight anymore, we don't need to store photos in a format meant to minimize bytes at the expense of quality.
Edit: and good luck uploading the format to the majority of webforms that aren’t faang.
Interns won't want to work on a dead end like this. Moreso they need to be supervised by someone that doesn't want to get removed by being the lowest X% usefulness in a company. So all these existing tools that aren't primary revenue generators just sit on coast mode.
Let’s also not forget the dependency mess that leaves in applications before we do though..
Better image formats serve entities who store images at scale, not end users.
In what other industry would it be considered acceptable to exclude 5% of visitors/users/clients?
Note that I'm looking at "all tracked," which excludes 2% "other" browsers in the data whose featureset is not known.
That's not how it works.
The server declares what versions of media it has, and the client requests a supported media format. The same trick have been used for audio and video for ages too.
Example:
<picture>
<source srcset="a.webp" type="image/webp">
<img src="fallback.jpg">
</picture>Will say though that it's not universal, it depends heavily on the corner of the internet you're on.
But even beyond that, most file formats have a bit of a header at the start of the file that declares the actual format of the file. Browsers already can understand that and use the correct render for a file without an extension.
Images are often at different resolutions too, that way, depending on the pixel density of the device, and the physical size, the browser can select the photo that has high enough resolution, but not one that is needlessly large, while also selecting the preferred image format.
See CSS image-set : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image/image...
Rational, or economical? I find it rational to help someone in need since I'd want others to do the same to me, even if it's not financially profitable for me. Imo more factors flow into what's rational, but I understand what you mean by corporate greed working this way (less than 10% of people are blind, neither male nor female, run a free operating system or can't afford a new computer, etc., so yep they're not profitable groups and for-profits don't optimise for that)
If a corporation has determined that profit maximization is their core tenet, excluding the needs of a minority of users can likely be deduced in a rational manner from that tenet. That is precisely why values need to be forced onto corporate actors through regulation, e.g. in this case through mandatory accessibility guidelines like EU directive 2019/882 that enters into force this very week.
Or Linux users? Or even Firefox users in our market?
As for Linux users… I do recall they were even less than the 3%. Firefox users were more tho.
In any case, I’m almost sure most Linux users were fine. We just didn’t wanted to support old browsers.
e.g. cars - not everyone is physically able to drive books - blind people can't read music - deaf people can't hear
It is a form of 80/20 or 90/10 rule the last small percentage costs as much as the majority.
(Also, the parent comment's example is also not so good because as someone else pointed just because the top 25% websites are serving webp it does mean they're not serving alternative formats for those who does not support it, as this is quite trivial to setup)