I don’t know what a .webp file is but I don’t like it. They’re like a filthy prank version of the image/gif you’re looking for. They make you jump through all these hoops to find the original versions of the files that you can actually do anything with.
Edit: honestly I assumed it had something to do with Google protecting themselves from image piracy shit
Yeah for sure, new is not always better.
Though for compressed media file formats, that pretty much has been the correlation for a while (though obviously there’s many different conflicting qualities that can make a file format “good” for various purposes)
Take video for example: MPEG2 came along and MPEG quickly became uncommon within a couple of years. MPEG4 displaced MPEG2 due to being more efficient. DivX/AVC replaced that for the same reasons and HVEC/VP9 replaced that. We’ve got AV1 coming now that looks to have beaten h.266/VVC to the punch, but it’s still a fairly linear progression of improvement.
Given all that it’s kind of mad we’ve not seen the same level of iteration on image file formats, but that’s almost entirely down to browser wars and having to pick lowest common denominators. JPEG2000 might have taken off if it wasn’t for the fact only Apple ever implemented it in a browser—it was definitely a technically better format.
It’s due to the maths behind. Special algebra is used for video compression, and a discovery has been made something like 15 years ago that allows a better video compression. It fueled technical progresses of the last years.
For images, we basically hit the wall quite some time ago. The new technologies are more about engineering improvement than math improvement.
Then there is the technical environment. It doesn’t matter if your technology is a bit better than the old one because the cost to change the whole technical environment is insane. That’s why ipv4 is still there for example. Changing everything for a new technology to be used is a long, costly and painful progress. But this is something only developpers can’t cope with, because the development culture is painfully ignorant of industry constraints and time lines.
I wouldn’t say that. Maybe youtube uses it by default (I don’t know, though) but a lot of other sites still use H264.
And I don’t see AV1 even on the horizon.
A couple of years ago (2?) I tried converting some of my huge H264 video files to AV1 with then up to date ffmpeg. It was horrendously slow. I don’t remember the numbers but I’m pretty sure it was progressing much slower than the clock.