WebP – A new image format for the Web

https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/?csw=1

by personjerry • 12 years ago

93 50 12 years ago

developers.google.com

Things to consider: WebP browser support is currently terrible (http://caniuse.com/webp), and it seems the solution to make WebP images display in non-supported browsers is through the help of a rather large JS file (http://webpjs.appspot.com/).

skbohra123• 12 years ago

This will improve with time, every new technology starts like this and if it's better than the current technology, it sticks.

eurleif• 12 years ago

If it's sufficiently better than the current technology to overcome the switching costs, it sticks.

threeseed3• 12 years ago

WebP was released 3 years ago hence your entire premise is faulty.

The real truth is that being the best technically rarely guarantees success in the market.

Theodores• 12 years ago

Actually it is Google Pagespeed where the magic happens. You serve jpg, gif, png, pcx^H^H^H and then your nginx/Apache converts them to webp for you, on the fly, cached. If the person requesting your page runs chrome they get webp.

So that means everyone else gets a slow image format? Yes, but you have saved bandwidth and your pages have loaded quickly for ~50% of your users.

I don't think webp is really a source image format, more something that is browser and Pagespeed specific. Try it, you will be impressed.

threeseed3• 12 years ago

I'm confused what you are doing. You are taking an existing lossy format e.g. JPG and then recoding it in another lossy format. So yes you may save an insignificant amount of bandwidth but at the expense of introducing potentially significant artefacts in your images. What serious web developer is going to want to do this ?

billyhoffman2• 12 years ago

There is a big problem with auto-converting images, and its with HTTP caching.

Consider this: I have page.html, with an <img src=logo.jpg> tag. If I'm using Chrome and I request logo.jpg PageSpeed/the web server detects that I support WebP via the Accept header. It sends WebP image for the URL logo.jpg.

And that's a problem. Because the content for logo.jpg is no longer dependent entirely on the URL. It the URL, and the values of the User-Agent or the Accept headers, which determine the response.

This is called content negotiation and it utterly nullifies shared HTTP caching. This is bad because shared HTTP caching can be a huge performance win.

The right way to serve WebP images is to change the URL. The application logic that generates the HTML should detect that browser support webp and rewrite the image tag accordingly. In other words, page.html should include a <IMG src=logo.webp> tag.

This means that browsers that support webp get it, browsers that only support JPEG get it, and shared HTTP caches can be used without polluting the cache.

Sadly, PageSpeed and other technologies like it aren't currently smart enough to re-write the URL in the base HTML page. As always, technology that "automatically fixes problem X" rarely is the best solution.

ntakasaki• 12 years ago

Yes, but you have saved bandwidth and your pages have loaded quickly for ~50% of your users.

I don't think ~50% of users are running Chrome. Where are you getting your numbers from?

xpose2000• 12 years ago

Just to follow up on your comment. For those less willing to use the apache module, there is always the pagespeed web service where you can change DNS to get this accomplished. (And utilize Google's CDN as well).

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service

jlouis• 12 years ago

Google thought of this. Their Chrome browser probes for WebP server-side support through content negotiation. So you can still serve JPEGs to browsers, but those which are modern can get WebP images.

ninthfrank07• 12 years ago

If anyone is interested, the discussion on implementing WebP support in Firefox has recently moved from Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=856375) to mozilla.dev.media (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.media/qM...).

ZenoArrow5• 12 years ago

Found this comment interesting... > What about a deal: if Google implements APNG, we implement WebP ? ;)

maga• 12 years ago

Why is this up here? Anything changed about WebP recently? Any news I might have missed?

tommoor• 12 years ago

We've been using WebP in production in our chrome-only web application for over a year now, works well but not sure why it's on the front page of HN!

Google announcement about YouTube supporting it?

http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/23/google-webp-youtube-thumb...

danmaz743• 12 years ago

Transparency on lossy compressed images is something that I really crave.

Too• 12 years ago

Is the transparency channel also compressed or only the rgb?

danmaz743• 12 years ago

Alpha channel should be non-lossy compressed AFAIK.

TazeTSchnitzel• 12 years ago

WebP's support for animation is also great. Like animated GIFs, but in true colour with VP8 compression and optional transparency!

TD-Linux• 12 years ago

It's not really VP8 compression, as in the full video codec. But it's neat regardless.

pornel2• 12 years ago

Lossy transparency is possible already in a backwards-compatible way: please try http://pngquant.org (cross platform) or http://pngmini.com (Mac)

cromwellian• 12 years ago

I sense another flame war. Unless there is new data from a new set of image quality/compression tests, I would urge people to just look up the old threads instead of rehashing the arguments again.

Note: Although YouTube announced a switch, Google+ has long been using WebP to serve up images in the stream with substantial savings, so the usage of it by Google on their services is not new.

KaiserPro• 12 years ago

this seems rather prescient:

https://xkcd.com/927/

ZenoArrow5• 12 years ago

How is that prescient? Standards can get replaced when something better comes along. The question is whether WebP will be compelling enough to overtake what came before. It looks promising at first glance.

If anyone at a browser development company is reading this, vector image formats are more in need of disruption than raster image formats, SVG is versatile but it's bulky, a more compact vector image format would be welcome, especially in the age of responsive design.

That said, some technology standards can stick around far beyond what they should. MP3 is a classic example, there are far better music formats than MP3 (you'd be hard pressed to find a worse one that's still supported), but because of the sheer volume of music in that format, the 'good enough' status, and the limited abilities of some of the hardware players to handle better formats, we're stuck with it. This isn't something we should seek to encourage, but it does happen.

userbinator2• 12 years ago

a more compact vector image format would be welcome

SWF. It's more than just a vector image format, but it is far better than SVG in terms of both filesize and resources required to render. Too bad for the "Flash hater's stigma" and the direction Adobe took their player after the acquistion... although there are now a few other alternatives including Mozilla's Shumway.

jfoster• 12 years ago

Why does the absolute filesize of SVG matter? Nearly all web servers will compress it before putting it on the wire.

theandrewbailey• 12 years ago

Not really. The only other next-gen image format already implemented in a browser is JPEG XR. This is more like Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD.

prima-facie• 12 years ago

http://caniuse.com/webp Webp support in other browsers than Chrome is virtually nonexistent. However if a big chunk of your audience browses from Chrome, you could serve Webp today. It can be done in a browser neutral manner by looking at the Accept header.

pornel2• 12 years ago

For IE you can serve JPEG-XR http://caniuse.com/jpegxr and for Safari JPEG 2000.

crazygringo• 12 years ago

Interestingly enough, WebP is a great format to use if you don't want users saving your images.

More than once I've right-clicked an image to save it to disk, only later to discover I have no program on my computer which can open or view it, except for Chrome! No thumbnails, no previews, no Photoshop, nothing. (I know there are plug-ins, if I really wanted to.)

WebP – A new image format for the Web

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