Did you ever hear the tragedy of WebP The Efficient? I thought not. It’s not a story the GIF gang would tell you. It’s an image legend.
WebP was a new format of pictures, so efficient and so lightweight, it could use modern compression to influence the web pages to actually load faster…
It had such a knowledge of the user's needs that it could even keep transparency and animations from dying.
The power of modern computing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.
It became so widespread… The only thing we had to be afraid of, was people insisting on using formats from the 90's, which eventually, of course, they did.
Unfortunately, we didn't teach the noobs everything we knew about compression, then the noobs killed the format by converting it to PNG and sharing that.
Ironic. We could save the web from being too slow, but not from the users.
They do.
Photos in windows supports it. Preview on Mac OS/photos on iOS supports it. I assume anything android would support it as well. Plus every web browser supports it.
It does? Ive tried to use photos to open it before. Its impossible to associate the file with Photos intuitively. I am about to start directly editing my registry to see if i can do it there. (Windows 10, very custom so that might be the issue, I will try on a vanilla copy)
Looks like maybe only the photos app in Windows 11? My Windows 10 VM is pretty out of date but they could have updated it by now. But who knows with Microsoft.
According to wikipedia almost everyone jumped on board in about 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP#Support
But it took a while for it, and many people are probably running old software without the updates, so at this point the hate has cemented.
Web browsers may support it, but websites often do not (for upload).
Coincidentally Lemmy is where I've seen it used by far the most.
Probably 90% of the images that I've looked at have been webp.