This article didn't go into the biggest problem with webp for me: the inconveninence of the format outside the browser compared to the small space saving. There are better formats (the video-codec inspired ones like heif, avif, and what might come out of h266, or even jpeg-xl), and webp just seems like a compromise without enough upside.
My favorite is the URL ends with jpg but when you save the image you get a fucking WebP. Thanks everyone for breaking the Internet in the name of Google. The best.
It beat H.264 in terms of quality/size but not in terms of hardware support. This is why Google Meet is the laggiest video conference software, they keep trying to make VP9 a thing while the others stuck with H.264. And now there's H.265.
Google marketed it that way but I could never reproduce a meaningful size savings without noticeable quality loss. You need to serve a LOT of video before even the top-end 10% savings was worth it, especially if your traffic was spread across many items so doubling your storage cost cancelled out a fair chunk of the total. I have no doubt that YouTube saw a savings but I don’t know how many other sites did, and I would be curious what the savings was relative to the extra power used by the millions of client devices which could’ve streamed H.264 at 10% CPU versus having the fan on high.
If users don't have hardware accelerated video decoding, it's so bad that it actually hurts the experience. I can't imagine that being worth the space savings. There doesn't have to be a good reason YouTube does it, it might just be someone wanting to insert their tech, which I'm pretty sure is the reason Meet uses it.
I remember doing bluray re-encodes back in that day. x264 was simply better as an encoder when compared to vp8 and you knew that at least in terms of software everyone had a compatible decoder in their preferred codec-pack.
Oh yes, with uh websites where you download said re-encodes, there'd always be a few uploads with weird encoding and the author screaming in the comments that it's better and you gotta use the bleeding edge VLC before complaining that it doesn't work.
Even worse that the original blog post, because of this you may be dealing with a JPEG image, converted to WEBP, and then back to JPEG. And then maybe someone edited that JPEG and it got converted back to WEBP!
A large chunk of the hn commentors are debating over banding they can or can't see in a best case scenario WEBP image. The reality is the bulk of the WEBP images look horrible, something I've started to really notice only recently. Of course, you can "clean" the images by using different generative upscaling processes now, which is pretty ironic how much electricity we are using because someone wanted to save 45kb.
Also this reminds me a lot about GIFs being converted to JPEGs. 25~ years ago there was a lot of nice, clean GIF screenshots (256 colors was all you needed) that got destroyed by JPEG.
Google tells developers to use WEBP but has no problem serving petabytes of video ads no one wants to watch!
