I don't understand this argument. WebP is an algorithm, not a service. You cannot kill it once it's published.
Wow! I have never written a compression codec implementation, but that's kind of staggering.
What Google pushes is in their self interest and has nothing to do with the good of the unwashed masses.
WebP is to WebM what HEIC is to HEVC.
You can argue that using free codecs is a collateral benefit here, even though Google did it for selfish reasons. It is not detrimental to the public or the internet.
Although I need a engineering explanation as to why COBOL is still alive after all those years, because any tech cannot live forever.
Latin is still going strong as well as water pipes (oldest being several millenia old).
Hard to predict which innovations remain resilient. The longer they stick around the more ”Lindy-proof” they are.
There is also no guarantee that whatever new language you port the COBOL code to won't also be seen as obsolete in a few years. Software developers are a fickle bunch.
Was popular in the 60s in fintech, so banks, ATM:s and related systems went digital using it.
Those systems are still running.
As long as these two major sources of pictures stay on JPEG, I will too. Simply because that's all for subjective and completely debatable reasons.
Not everyone is you.
Support for webp is still so rough that I have to wonder what one's ecosystem must look like for it to be seamless. Maybe if you are a googler and your phone/computer/browser use entirely google software and ditto for your friends and your friends friends and your spouses? Maybe?
I blame Google for pushing it, but I also blame every third-party product for not supporting it, when it is mostly free to do so (I'm sure all of them internally use libraries to decode images instead of rolling their own code).
I use WEBP extensively but WEBP has a major flaw: it can do both lossy and lossless.
That's the most fucktarded thing to ever do for an image compression format. I don't understand the level of confusion and cluelessness that had to happen for such a dumb choice to have been made.
I've got an entire process around determining and classifying WEBP depending on whether they're lossless or lossy. In the past we had JPG our PNG: life was good. Simple. Easy.
Then dumbfucks decided that it made sense to cram both lossy and lossless under the same umbrella.
> They also want to ensure far future access to their precious photos, when formats like JPEG2000 or even WebP might be long gone.
That however shall never be an issue. You can still open, today, old obscure formats from the DOS days. Even custom ones only use by a very select few software back then.
It's not as if we didn't have emulators, converters, etc. and it's all open source.
Opening old WEBP files in the future shall never ever be a problem.
Determining if it's a lossy or lossless WEBP for non-technical users, however... ; )
Certainly not true.
One example: I have many thousands of photos from my Sony digital camera that cannot be opened by any current operating system without installing third-party software.
I'm lucky that the camera also output JPEG versions as it saved, so I'm able to view the JEPG thumbnails, then drag the Sony version into my photo editor of choice.
Except for if you wanted a compressed image with transparency for the web, in which case you had to sacrifice one of those two things or use a different format besides those two.
> Then dumbfucks decided that it made sense to cram both lossy and lossless under the same umbrella.
> I don't understand the level of confusion and cluelessness that had to happen for such a dumb choice to have been made.
Besides many end users not caring which one it is as long as they recognize the file type and can open it, I found a few interesting reasons for having both in the same format from a simple web search. One was the possibility of having a lossy background layer with a lossless foreground layer (particularly in an animation).
JPEG XL also decided to support either lossless or lossy compression, so it wasn't just WebP that decided it made sense.
People want to be able to open the images anywhere (what about watching photos in a smartTV? or an old tablet? what about digital picture frames?). They want to edit the images in any program (what about this FOSS editor? what about the many people stuck in pre-subscription Photoshop versions?).
They also want to ensure far future access to their precious photos, when formats like JPEG2000 or even WebP might be long gone. I mean, webp was made by Google and we know how many of their heavily promoted creations are dead already...