Because they broke the web for their users.
> Reducing file size is more important than short term convenience here.
Not for users, no. The only gain here is facebook's bandwidth costs, at the expense (and inconvenience) of its users.
If they're right-clicking the image to download the photo, it's already broken -- Facebook serves a heavily re-compressed JPEG by default. You need to use the menu option to download the original.
I wouldn't hire the graphic designer quoted in the article; they should be able to see the compression artifacts that Facebook leaves in the images they upload, and be aware that they should be using flickr or dropbox or another photo storage service instead.
No, they didn't. The web works fine. They can browse it without any issues. The problems occur when they're trying to do stuff on their local machines.
> Not for users, no. The only gain here is facebook's bandwidth costs, at the expense (and inconvenience) of its users.
Change rarely occurs smoothly.
By all means, try to explain that to users if you like, and if you think they'd care. The issue is that it breaks the user experience, whatever technical reason you'd like to attribute that to.
The users are completely irrelevant, because no matter how much they bitch and moan, they're not going to leave Facebook. Its network effects are too powerful. And so, for once, I actually support Facebook. They're using their dominant market position to push a new standard that is quite good. This will hopefully force companies like Adobe to start adding support for WebP by default. Then we'll finally able to ditch obsolete standards like JPEG and its ilk once and for all.
Facebook is still doing what Facebook intends to do, in fact they do it better! It's unfortunate that a tiny margin of users are slightly inconvenienced, but they need to get over it.
If it saves a significant amount of bandwidth it could be useful to mobile users too, who might find themselves stuck somewhere with nothing but GPRS in a congested cell.
Users love faster websites. If you make your website faster, people will use it more. If you're selling something, they will buy more if your site is fast.
This has been A/B tested by countless companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Shopzilla, and so forth. Front-end performance is amazingly important.
No, they did not. They broke it for the people who download the image for viewing outside of their web browser.
Facebook is integral to the everyday lives of many ordinary people, and the lesson here is that the designers at Facebook need to think beyond the specific tech and content that they build and deliver; they need to also consider the context in which their product is used.
Some users are facing a temporary inconvenience but everyone gets an immediate & long term gain.
If you want web to progress forward, then things are going to get broken. WebP is an efficient format, and face-book is doing a good thing by increasing it's adoption speed.
Actually, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see someone, somewhere tout that as an advantage of WebP: "Joe Shmoe can't rip off your pictures in Photoshop!"
</cynicism>
What is much easier? Waiting for the next version of Photoshop to come (if you need built-in support for WebP, or APNG or whatnot) and splash out $1000 on that
or making facebook put that small link on photos?
You decide.
If the format beats out PNG & JPG, the industry will follow and image editors will get built in support.
Reducing file size is more important than short term convenience here.