

Facebook tries Google's WebP image format; users squawk - robin_reala
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57580664-93/facebook-tries-googles-webp-image-format-users-squawk/

======
Lewisham
I think this kerfuffle does point at something that would be nice to have
ratified in the HTML spec somewhere: the idea that content exists in different
qualities and formats, and that when the user requests to download the
content, she's presented with the different options possible. Content
negotiation still only has one chosen format come down the pipe; a decision
that the user probably hasn't made.

Right now, we're stuck with everybody doing something different in the page
design to do something that's pretty important and fairly intrinsic to much of
what happens on the web. And so users just default to the thing they know
works everywhere, which is Save As... It's not surprising some of them are
upset.

The only issue I can see with this is that there are security concerns with
being able to override what is actually downloaded when Save As is used.

~~~
paulirish
In Chrome, it looks like we're going to register as the default handler for
webp images, so they're viewable post-download, similar to what's done with
PDFs: <https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=234275>

~~~
Negitivefrags
Why not trans-code the image format to something more common if the user wants
to save the image? I would imagine that would be far more useful to the vast
majority of users.

~~~
igrigorik
A good discussion on this here:
[https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromiu...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromium-
discuss/oUBhAMDX17U/RyvQ89PmKq0J)

------
NelsonMinar
The primary complaint here is users don't know what to do with a .webp when
they download their photos. And support does seem limited; it looks like
Photoshop needs a plugin, for instance. But Facebook could solve that specific
problem by having a real "Download as JPG" button while still using WebP for
inline images.

~~~
dfxm12
Why does Facebook have to do anything here? Isn't reducing file sizes and load
times the right thing to do for them? Shouldn't the burden fall on image
viewers/editors?

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.

~~~
masklinn
> Why does Facebook have to do anything here?

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.

~~~
w1ntermute
> Because they broke the web for their users.

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.

~~~
jterce
> The problems occur when they're trying to do stuff on their local machines.

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.

~~~
w1ntermute
I'm not explaining anything to the users, I'm just explaining to you how
you're wrong when you state that they "broke the web for their users".

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.

------
cromwellian
Is this really happening via the "Download" link, or is this being caused by
people right clicking and saying "Save Image As..." because if you want to
preserve or work with images, you probably should not be saving images from
the context menu, which are often scaled and processed, and instead be asking
for the original/raw/high resolution upload.

~~~
smackfu
That's nice in theory, but for years, Facebook photos had no download link,
and the only option was to Save As the one you could see. It's very confusing
for people when the only way to do something suddenly becomes the wrong way to
do it, for no reason they can see.

~~~
alexwright
So we should all stand still in time because current tech is understood by
this generation?

You have to draw a line somewhere. The download has in fact been there for
years now, at least since late '09. I only remember because we had to download
a bunch of images and our only source without giving away a surprise was FB. I
was given a bunch of crappy 70% 800x600 .jpgs and I had to show the person
getting the images the download like, which at the time wasn't even in the
Options menu. Users...

------
six
The funniest thing about this article was the image comparison between JPG and
WebP, saved as JPEG-vs-WebP.jpg. Nice one CNET.

~~~
lttlrck
Par for the course...

------
jrockway
I'm not sure if one user's ungrammatical post to a mailing list means much.
These are the people that post angry comments on readwriteweb when they search
for "facebook login" and click through to an article instead of Facebook:

[http://readwrite.com/2010/02/10/facebook_wants_to_be_your_on...](http://readwrite.com/2010/02/10/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login)

------
paulbeattie
Why is this even a news story? Surely if anything we should be praising the
use of a new and arguably beneficial image format rather than complaining
about some users incompetence to grab a view to open it on their computer.

It really seems such a bizarre thing to be complaining about. Facebook could
make it a little easier by having a download as jpeg image option as well.

The world is always moving forward, why don't we just go back to bitmaps!

~~~
acdha
People care about pictures which are important to them. They don't care about
the encoding scheme currently in vogue or reducing Facebook's bandwidth bill
by a small percentage at a significant interoperability and thus usability
hit. The average computer user has been able to use “Save As” on images for
every image they've every seen online with little question that the result
will work with their local applications – until now.

The most charitable way I can describe your decision to blame the user is
poorly considered. I would like to see new formats catch on but early adopters
have to assume responsibility for the growing pains – Facebook making the
trivial effort required to make their download link more prominent is about as
easy as it gets.

------
chrisfarms
Obligatory: <http://xkcd.com/1172/>

~~~
ihuman
When I saw that link, I was expecting to open this one: <http://xkcd.com/927/>

------
niels_olson
Gimp has a plugin for WebP support

<http://registry.gimp.org/node/25874>

<http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1809284>

Apparently Photoshop does too:
[https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/?fromgroup...](https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/webp-
discuss/QU9xSMZO-A4)

------
jedberg
I remember this exact same argument about 20 years ago when JPG started
getting popular. "I need a _special_ program to see it?"

The viewers and OSs and browsers will catch up soon enough.

~~~
acdha
JPEG was an enormous improvement, particularly given the far slower
connections in use at the time: waiting minutes rather than hours to download
an image over my 2400bps modem was huge. In contrast, WebP offers marginal
compression improvements, significantly increased hardware requirements and
only a few technical improvements (e.g. alpha channels & lossless, although
since the latter is so much slower and less effective than PNG I'm not sure
there's much of a point).

For many users, this simply isn't enough to justify pushing it through the
toolchain.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
It may be slower but why do you think its less effective?

[http://extrememoderate.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/a-web-
centri...](http://extrememoderate.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/a-web-centric-
image-compression-benchmark/)

And that's not counting the benefits of when PNG is used for alpha in
otherwise photorealistic images where you can get 70% benefits at web sizes.

~~~
acdha
Less effective = lower compression savings. I was testing with source lossless
JP2s in the 6MB range: PNG was 14MB and WebP took at least 10x compression
time to hit 20MB (tied with TIFF LZW for least savings).

~~~
ZeroGravitas
So it looks like it is effective in web use cases, like lossy photos
(especially with alpha), logos, icons etc., but not for non-web cases like
large, lossless photos that need to be compressed quickly. Seems like a good
engineering tradeoff to me.

~~~
acdha
First, declaring everything WebP is bad at as "non web" assumes that everyone
uses the web only for things they don't care about, which isn't remotely true
as the original article shows. People save what they can see - and normal
people don't want to switch tools for each situation.

Second, it's still not the case that WebP offers a significant advantage over
JPEG-2000 or JPEG-XR, both of which are standardized, better supported, more
flexible, and have much better designed file formats.

------
dz0ny
Changing user-agent as article suggest is a little too extreme. Looks like no
one knows about download link under options, that link servers jpg.

~~~
pyre
To be fair, "options" isn't where I would expect a download link to be.

------
kozikow
Solution: Someone write chrome plugin that will let people convert from webp
to jpeg when downloading from chrome:
[https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?fromgroups=#...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/chromium-
discuss/oUBhAMDX17U) . Just add option "Save and convert webp to jpeg" next to
"save as" if plugin detects it may be webp.

------
omarrr
Just have Facebook add a "Download as JPEG" button and let us all go back to
more important things.

~~~
grecy
But then Facebook have to store two formats, something I'm sure they don't
want to do.

~~~
apendleton
They're doing that anyway because they serve non-webp images to users with
non-webp-supporting browsers. Anyhow, this is the image that's for display,
which is resized/compressed; they store and allow you to download the original
no matter what.

I'm skeptical of this solution for other reasons, though (like that it assumes
users know what JPG means).

~~~
apalmer
Users who don't know what JPG means are not going to be attempting to edit the
images in photoshop. Although perhaps they are saving the files to their local
windows machine.

------
pornel
It is a symptom of lack of interoperability. People do share images. They link
them. They save them. They e-mail them. They mix and edit. They re-upload them
to other sites.

JPEG has such a broad interoperability that we don't even notice just how
incredibly many sites/apps/libraries/OSes/devices support it. Having WebP
support only in Chrome is not enough for it to be 1st class citizen.

Just think how many apps and services need to adopt the format before you'll
able to upload your avatar in WebP without worrying it won't work.

------
Terretta
I was struck by the supposed reluctance to update the browser's accept header
to specify that the browser now accepts this image type. It's what it's for.

The "every time you add a byte it stays" argument is specious -- how often
have we added an image format to the web?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_negotiation>

~~~
igrigorik
Actually: <https://chromiumcodereview.appspot.com/13814024> :-)

------
Steko
My understanding is that WebP is superior to Jpeg when encoding from a
lossless image but:

(1) if I upload a lossy jpeg what gains is FB really getting by using WebP?

(2) Or am I taking a quality hit on what they serve?

Let's say there's no quality hit and somehow they make a lossless WebP version
of my lossy jpeg that still fits in 20% fewer bytes. Define X as the dollar
savings gained by delivering these images scaled up to quadrillions of images
served.

My understanding is that WebP makes it's gains by a 10x longer encode. Define
Y as the dollar cost of encoding and storing trillions of images in WebP.

(3) What are the odds X is actually greater than Y?

------
username3
In Chrome, right click, copy image, paste in Paint.

------
dvhh
I'm somewhat curious of the reason of why some users would like to download
images from facebook.

------
DanBC
Has Google provided patches to all the open source image tools to handle WebP
images?

~~~
yebyen
This can only be a troll... 'all the open source image tools'? That seems like
an intractable set to me. They shouldn't need to. I see there's an imlib2 webp
loader. It is BSD licensed. I don't see that it came from Google.

So what's your point? We're supposed to be hating Facebook anyway, not Google
in this article.

~~~
DanBC
"Some of the most popular open source tools" would have been better.

Google is a huge company, with many good programmers.

A reference implementation is great.

Provide patches to some of the most used open source products just helps
Google spread their tech, and helps all those open source products.

My post wasn't meant to be a dig at Google. Re-reading it I see that it could
be read that way, and I apologise for that.

~~~
yebyen
I understand. <https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/download>

There is a set of command-line utilities, a library with source, and a codec
for Windows Imaging Component which has no parallel in Linux that I am aware
of. (save imlib2 and friends)

I don't know any project that uses image formats in any way and does not link
directly with libpng, libjpeg, lib(un)gif, or other directly supporting
libraries that are tied to individual formats. There is an evas webp loader on
eina, which is no help to Gnome or KDE users, and there are dozens if not
hundreds of projects that probably need support to be added.

Don't know how ubiquitous Windows Imaging Component is in MS-land, but it
seems like a much easier problem to have solved.

