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Comment by archerx | Hacker News Reader

Google created webp and that is why they are giving it unjustified preferential treatment and has been trying to unreasonably force it down the throat of the internet.

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WebP gave me alpha transparency with lossy images, which came in handy at the time. It was also not bogged down by patents and licensing. Plus like others said, if you support vp8 video, you pretty much already have a webp codec, same with AV1 and avif

Lossy PNGs exist with transparency.

PNG as a format is not lossy, it uses deflate.

What you’re referring to is pngquant which uses dithering/reduces colors to allow the PNG to compress to a smaller size.

So the “loss” is happening independent of the format.

Do you mean lossless? PNGs are not lossy. A large photo with alpha channel in a lossless png could easily be 20x the size of a lossy webp

No I meant lossy. This is the library I use; https://pngquant.org/

Pre-processing does not a codec make (this is why .gif is considered lossless even though you lose all that 24-bit colour goodness)

Fair enough but it gets the job done well none the less.

PNG of course can be lossy. They aren’t great at it, but depending on the image can be good enough.

unjustified preferential treatment over jpegxl a format google also had created

They helped create jpegXL but they are not the sole owner like they are with webp. There is a difference.

a better argument might be that chrome protects their own vs a research group in google switzerland, however as other mentioned the security implications of another unsafe binary parser in a browser is hardly worth it

Webp has had major vulnerabilities.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/uncovering-the-hidden-webp-vulne...

which only strengthens my argument, webp seemed like some ad-hoc pet project in chrome, and that ended like most unsafe binary parsers, with critical vulnerabilities

> webp seemed like some ad-hoc pet project in chrome

FWIW webp came from the same "research group in google switzerland" that later developed jpegxl.

I now see that webp lossless is definitely from there, but the webp base format looks acquired from a US startup, was the image format also adapted in the swiss group?

You're getting downvoted, but you're not wrong. If anyone else had come up with it, it would have been ignored completely. I don't think it's as bad as some people make it out to be, but it's not really that compelling for end users, either. As other folks in the thread have pointed out, WebP is basically the static image format that you get “for free” when you've already got a VP8 video decoder.

The funny thing is all the places where Google's own ecosystem has ignored WebP. E.g., the golang stdlib has a WebP decoder, but all of the encoders you'll find are CGo bindings to libwebp.

I noticed Hacker news is more about feelings than facts lately which is a shame.

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