A lukewarm defence of WebP – Garystu's Web log!

WebP Bad

WebP feels like DRM. It’s interrupting the long standing trinity of GIF, PNG, and JPEG for web images. Its not supported by many legacy programs – well-supported by programs released in the last few years, but if you have an older or abandoned image tool you like using, it’ll give you problems. It feels like it appeared overnight, and nothing supports it.

WebP is developed by Google. It is free, open source, Google don’t directly profit off it, and WebP can be implemented by anyone. Either way, it feels a step in Google taking control of what formats and technologies we use to view the web. In particular, the way WebP has been pushed to the exclusion of the competing and better (for static images) JPEGXL image format has many concerned.

Google have used Chrome, a proprietary freeware web browser based on Google’s open-source Chromium browser, to implement several controversial hostile anti-features. Google develops the browser, Google develops the image formats, and Google bad. Its a bit silly*, but I do see where the apprehension comes from. Even if so much is open-source, for now, what stops Google for enshittifying the web from the core of its file format foundations in the future? I don’t personally see the future shaking out this way, but I can empathise with the concern.

*Not the part about Google being bad. Google bad.

Unfortunately, WebP is good for animated images. It’s so good. Lets look at the competition, to argue why its time for a change:

What about…

GIF?

I love GIF! But even as I love them, I need to concede that GIF is an old, dusty image format with restrictions that seem arcane by today’s standards. 256 colours is a tiny amount. When GIF was competing with JPEG 1, it produced images that were comparatively sharp and clear. But the world has moved on, and GIF is no longer competing with image formats from the 1980s.

The only advantage GIF has had for decades is the fact its widely supported and animated – some newer web apps no longer know what to do with static GIFs. This inertia of being widely supported and animated has kept GIF around long after its been pushed to its limits. Animated GIFs were designed around short, low resolution looping images – using them to display short clips of TV shows is them at their absolute limit.

The kind of image the animated GIF file format was build around – a small cartoon with a few colours.

Web users wanted a format to display short animated clips from videos, TV and movies. And GIF was the closest fit. These push the format to its limits, with large file sizes and obvious compression artefacts.

APNG?

The compression isn’t very good. Despite what the rest of this article has me sounding like, I’m not some file format expert. All I know, with the tools i’ve used, is that these files come out huge. I don’t like that.

APNG was only recently embraced by the PNG Development Group. Although it has been supported on the web a long time, this lack of official support has left its status in the lurch from 2007 to 2023. Its a format in a really weird place, and history will tell if official support has come just in time to be superseded by WebP.

MPEG-4

Here’s where we hit a compatibility snag, with the way the web is organised by those designing platforms. This is just video. And its good, its fine. A silent video is a good, compressed way of delivering short clips – and I have done so on this website before. For a self-hosted website, using short silent video is a good way to show short animated clips.

But its all in the usage, and the people who run platforms – they might not want to support video. They want “video” and “image” file formats to be two separate spheres to support. Its useful for platform content management for video and images to be kept separate, and for this separation to be designated by file format. Since platforms are a primary way users interact with the web, mass-adoption of a video format in place of an image format is not possible.

You can’t natively upload video clips – but platforms did convert your GIFs to very compressed videos, leading to the ugliest compression known to man.

I loooove the colour banding of gifs combined with the blurry DCT artifacting of MP4. Lossy compression on top of lossy compression. This is so ugly, that the ugliness is an artform in itself. This is deep fried. This is gore, compression gore of the image format I love.

Aversion to short form video is changing for different reasons. The success of short-form video platforms has created a gold rush mania around being the next Tiktok. If you though reaction GIFs were annoying they’re making reaction images with sound now and its worse. But this isn’t an old man yells at cloud rant. This is…