Ask HN: Why aren't more apps using WebP format?

[dngit]

WebP has been around for a while now, offering better compression and performance over JPEG and PNG. So why haven't more apps fully adopted it yet? Are there hidden compatibility issues, performance downsides, or just inertia in the industry? Curious to hear if the switch to WebP has made a difference for anyone here, especially for mobile performance.

[solardev]

Because it's Google. Apple in particular didn't want to play nice for many years and tried to pitch HEIC support instead (or AVIF these days). WebP came out in 2010, right when the whole mobile app vs web app thing was heating up and Apple/Google were fighting for mindshare. It wasn't until 2020 that Apple added stable support for WebP.

Neither offered a big enough improvement for end-users to care.* Cloud operators did care, and Imgix and Cloudinary can automatically transform older formats to WebP or AVIF, for example: https://docs.imgix.com/en-US/getting-started/tutorials/perfo... and https://cloudinary.com/documentation/image_optimization#auto...

There are also a bunch of Wordpress extensions that can do the same, and FOSS proxies too.

* Hell, you think PNGs are bad? We still use animated GIFs and MP3s, even though both are terrible by today's efficiency standards. Sometimes good enough is good enough.

[JohnFen]

As a user, WebP doesn't really bring anything to me that matters. I mildly dislike it (not enough to really complain), though, because a lot of my tools still don't understand the format.

So, at least for me, it's 99% inertia.

[nicoloren → JohnFen]

Some browser or older versions don't support webp too. I think of the web browser in the Kobo e-readers for example.

[babyent]

I use webp in my applications.

HEIC don’t display in browsers. Or maybe they do now but I haven’t checked lol. AVIF don’t work well in iOS messages for example. If you send someone an AVIF it asks you to download it. WEBP works just fine, like you’d expect any image to show up.

I used to convert any non JPEG image to JPEG.

Nowadays I convert any non WEBP image to WEBP.

My B2B saas has a file explorer functionally in it. Any image for display is served as WEBP, and it is converted after upload. The WEBP files are like 20-90% smaller than what the user uploaded. Of course, the user can download and I give them their original file back.

AWS charges me for bandwidth which is more expensive than storage. Most users upload images and view them (open it up in viewer) maybe twice. But they will scroll a lot more and when the explorer opens in grid they can see anywhere from a dozen to 40 images. A small amount will download the original again.

WEBP is used by a lot of non-Google companies. Notion, for example converts images to webp.

[wruza]

I process large amounts of images for sd and also do simple graphics work sometimes. Webp saves some space but is slow af at saving, like 10-50x slow. So not even remotely a good tradeoff. Reading is fine, afaict.

[babyent → wruza]

What do you mean it’s slow at saving? Do you mean the conversion is slow?

[wruza → babyent]

Yes, all tools freeze for much longer when it comes to webp output.

[babyent → wruza]

Ah ok. I do image processing via aws lambda. Takes like 400ms to 5s depending on size and original format.

[carlosjobim]

Because you also want to sell to customers who have older devices, which can't display WebP. People who are not computer enthusiasts can keep a machine around for a decade or more. The gains from using WebP are negligible, the downside when they break are significant.

[dngit → carlosjobim]

I would argue that the gain is more than "negligible" in some cases. I'm building an app involving storing and serving images and I'm surprised that for the same images with the same resolution/quality, WebP is often 3x-4x smaller than PNG, which translates to lower storage cost, faster serving time, and happier users. You made a good point that people with older devices wouldn't be able to use apps like mine. But for me, the gain is so significant that I might just accept that.

[carlosjobim → dngit]

Lowering your hosting costs usually translates into savings counted in the tens or hundreds of dollars per year. Loosing just a single customer because they can't see images of your product means loosing income of tens or hundreds of dollars, depending on what you're selling. Now take that times hundreds, or thousands of customers.

Optimized JPG images are tiny, and will load fast on any device. Any web designer worth their salt must know how to make a performant site without needing WebP images.

[solardev → carlosjobim]

If a computer/browser is so old it can't support WebP, it probably also can't support modern HTTPS/TLS requirements. How do they even check out?

[toast0 → solardev]

TLS 1.2 is still widely supported; the standard dates from 2008, but didn't really get pushed hard IMHO until right before HeartBleed (April 2014); and there was the SHA1 certificate deprecation that took effect in 2016. A lot of things that got updated to use sha2 certs also got updated to use TLS 1.2, and should work fine with most https out there.

Chrome had support for WebP pretty early, because Google, but caniuse.com says 2018 for Edge, 2019 for Firefox and 2020 for Safari. There's a lot of potential software out there that works in a post-2016 timeframe, but not with WebP.

[carlosjobim → solardev]

MacOS Mojave was released in 2018 and the stock Safari browser does not support WebP, even when updated.

[afiori → solardev]

the http stack is updated as part of the app/browser, media codecs are often updated as part of the OS

[solardev → afiori]

> media codecs are often updated as part of the OS

I thought that was mainly true in the Apple world. Does that apply to Windows and Linux too? (As in, I thought many browsers implement their own codecs)

[b3ing]

Same reason many aren't using HEIC or HEIF which are common image files from phones now. They are overlooked or aren't thought about.

Also many people forget about JPE, which is rare, but I've had problems with it, its basically a DOS format for JPEG, and alternative for JPG

[MarcOnly]

I was using it for a while in Wordpress, pain in the a*. Had to revert back to JPG and convert everything to JPG again.

[MarcOnly]

Ask chatGPT to create an image and when you download it it's in webP.

[vunderba]

I really wanted to like WebP as a one stop replacement for jpg/png/gif. Sadly the ios webkit decoder for animated webp is infuriatingly inconsistent wrt frame rate so I had to abandon it.