• Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    arrow-down
    27
    ·
    1 year ago

    I don’t even understand the point of webp. Why do we need to make pngs and jpegs smaller? Who has internet that can’t handle those files most of the time? It’s not like people are posting 500 mb images.

    • Orbituary@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      46
      ·
      1 year ago

      It’s not about the bandwidth and ability when you’re reducing file size. It’s the aggregate of doing so when the site has a large number of those files, multiplied by the number of times the files get pulled from a server.

      It’s conserving size for the provider. Most commercial servers have metering.

    • PizzaButtAndTacoHell@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      16
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Cell connectivity.

      A physical internet connection doesn’t have many issues as at all with bulkier formats, but cell networks – especially legacy hardware that is yet to be upgraded – will have more issues sending as much data (i.e. more transmission errors to be corrected and thereby use up more energy, whereas the power cost of transmission error correction for cabled networks is negligible).

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        9
        ·
        1 year ago

        Even when I have one bar, as long as I have a connection, I won’t have a problem with a 50k png. A screenshot on my 27" monitor is less than that. And the legacy hardware was designed with pngs and jpegs in mind because they didn’t have webp at the time. So that really doesn’t make sense to me.

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          1 year ago

          It’s less about individual small screenshots (PNGs for example are pretty large with real photographs, which can take minutes to load with a bad connection) and more about multiple images on one site. User retention is strongly affected by things like latency and loading speed. The best way to improve these metrics is to reduce network traffic. Images are usually the biggest part of a page load.

    • steventhedev@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Large companies that serve a ton of content. CDNs, image hosts, Google, Facebook, etc. 1% of their traffic adds up to a lot.

      Also people in limited bandwidth situations - satellite links, Antarctica, developing countries, airplanes, etc.

      Finally, embedded systems. The esp32 for example has 520kb of ram.

    • xeekei@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      But maybe 500 people are posting 1 MB images? These concepts ain’t hard, mate.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        7
        ·
        1 year ago

        If your web page has 1 mb jpegs, sure, you need webp. Because you don’t know how to add appropriately-sized images.

        Again, a jpeg of png of a 27" monitor screenshot is like 50kb.

        • xeekei@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Please extrapolate a bit. I used the numbers to make it easy for you. Let’s try again.

          10 000 people posting 50 KB images. And we are right back where we started. Webp is objectively better than old JPEG.

          Also, “a jpeg of(‘or’?) a png of a 27” monitor screenshot" makes no sense. Jpegs and pngs are not the same filesize for the same image, and the diagonal dimension of a monitor is irrelevant. Are we talking 1080p, 1440p, or 2160p?

    • Stamets@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      18
      ·
      1 year ago

      Neither do I. I’ve heard so much from so many people about it being a ‘better’ extension in all these ways but I mean… it just comes off like audiophile-style conversations about how this specific record player with x speaker set allows for the warmth better than this other set that costs the same amount of money. That amount being your blood, various organs, and the life energies of everything in a 50 mile radius.

      How is it better when no one fucking supports it?!

        • Stamets@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          13
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          Where I’m from, a frigid corner of the 9th circle of hell, both the United States Dollar and Tears of the Innocent are used interchangeably.

      • bjorney@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        14
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        When your site serves each user 20+ images and you get millions of unique users a year, saving 25-35% on each image translates into a LOT of saved bandwidth

      • Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        12
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        “No one supports it” because support doesn’t just happen overnight. These things happen slowly. Same way they did with jpg and png.

        Sure, part of the “better” is the audiophile “better quality” thing. But the major point is that it’s objectively a better compression. Which means less data needs to be transfered, which means things go faster. Sure people claim they “don’t notice” an individual image loading, but you rarely load one image, and image loading is often the bulk of the transfer. If we can drop that by 30%, not only does your stuff load 30% faster, but EVERYONE does, which means whoever is serving you the content can serve MORE people more frequently. Realistically, it’s actually a greater than 30% improvement because it also gets other people “out of your way” since they aren’t hogging the “pipes” as long.