Time to go for a WebP

October 29, 2010 6:05 PM

Google wants to speed up the Web by killing the JPEG.... and replace it with a spiffier graphics format that might be pronounced "Web-pee". The new format promises to be a whiz, cutting image sizes up to forty percent. WebP is part of a broader web video initiative WebM.
posted by storybored (66 comments total)

More info here.
posted by storybored at 6:07 PM on October 29, 2010

Seems like a reasonable idea. Anyone know what the licensing terms are? Ideally, Google would release this under a BSD or MIT license, so that support can quickly work its way into existing tools.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:08 PM on October 29, 2010

Web Pee?

What?

Also, whatever happened to JPEG2000?

There are probably a lot of ways in which JPEG is obsolete. For one thing, it always uses 8x8 blocks, which was probably useful back when it was being developed, but there's no real reason not to use variable block sizes.
posted by delmoi at 6:12 PM on October 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Is this just so they can save space on their servers?
posted by TwelveTwo at 6:13 PM on October 29, 2010

No it's more to save time than space. In the more info link, Google seems to be planning to convert those pesky jpgs to WebP format on the fly.
posted by storybored at 6:14 PM on October 29, 2010

I think it would speed up the web a lot if I could somehow convince my dad to stop forwarding emails with multiple megabyte video attachments.

FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: LOL
posted by Fleebnork at 6:15 PM on October 29, 2010 [11 favorites]

WebP is an I-frame from WebM. It's BSD licensed, with a royalty-free patent license.

The problem, though, is that WebP is not very good. It doesn't even support all the features of ye olde JPEG. And it's kinda blurry-looking.
posted by zsazsa at 6:16 PM on October 29, 2010 [7 favorites]

WebP? I think it could make quite a splash. Maybe even get to Number 1!
posted by griphus at 6:23 PM on October 29, 2010 [6 favorites]

Of course, about half the users will need to sit down to WebP.
posted by lukemeister at 6:24 PM on October 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Also, whatever happened to JPEG2000?

Submarine patents, I think related to the wavelet transform. (see also)
posted by spiderskull at 6:31 PM on October 29, 2010

The problem, though, is that WebP is not very good. It doesn't even support all the features of ye olde JPEG. And it's kinda blurry-looking.

That's a rather an odd test case the almost-certainly-a-shill guy has cooked up there. I'm am somewhat unconvinced by his methodolgy, to say the least.
posted by Artw at 6:39 PM on October 29, 2010

I wrote it up here; I think, like most Google projects, it's still pretty beta. But having a set of unencumbered file formats for images, video, audio, and other documents and media is going to be important, and Google wants to get in on it.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 6:39 PM on October 29, 2010

Yeah, good luck with that.
posted by jacobian at 6:41 PM on October 29, 2010

That's a rather an odd test case the almost-certainly-a-shill guy has cooked up there.

That "almost-certainly-a-shill guy" is Jason Garrett-Glaser, one of the lead developers of x264, an open source implementation of H.264. He knows exactly what he is talking about when it comes to image quality.
posted by SirOmega at 6:42 PM on October 29, 2010 [5 favorites]

zsazsa writes "The problem, though, is that WebP is not very good. It doesn't even support all the features of ye olde JPEG. And it's kinda blurry-looking."

How can you do an image compression comparison like this and not include Lena Söderberg? That's just wrong.
posted by Mitheral at 6:44 PM on October 29, 2010 [9 favorites]

The real problem is that people use JPG for everything, not that JPG is widely used.
posted by clorox at 6:47 PM on October 29, 2010

There's a lot to be gained by better compression of images, but making them look like shit is not a price I'm willing to pay. WebP or whatever you call it not only has poor resolution, it fucks up the colour. Of course, if Google's tests say that 90% of people just won't notice, then undoubtedly we'll be looking at shit for the next twenty years.

Can't we stop making things sound and look WORSE for a change?
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:48 PM on October 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Oddly, I find the "WebP" name disturbing because of the "WikiP" shorthand for Wikipedia.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:54 PM on October 29, 2010

The real problem is that people use JPG for everything, not that JPG is widely used.

Certainly a master image should be in a lossless format but when file size is any concern at all, what else should you use besides JPEG? In most of the software I use, setting JPEG "quality" at 95% makes the file size significantly smaller than a PNG, usually without any noticeable artifacts. The miser in me can't stand to waste the bandwidth / disk space on an ephemeral 5% improvement in the image... unless, again, it's my master copy of the image.

Another reason I got in the habit of using JPEGs is that early on it was the only widely-readable format that supported embedded metadata.
posted by XMLicious at 7:04 PM on October 29, 2010

I'm confused. Mr Garret-Glaser claims that WebP uses 4x4 transform. Is this the same as the block size that Google claims is variable for WebP? Is that maybe a difference between WebP and just straight-up single-frame VP8? Or is this something different entirely?
posted by ErWenn at 7:08 PM on October 29, 2010

The real problem is that people use JPG for everything, not that JPG is widely used. --- Yeah. I bet if they implemented a good and easy way to do embeddable fonts, half the jpegs on the web could go away. More and more, I find I'm using pngs for my websites, mostly because they support transparent layers.
posted by crunchland at 7:13 PM on October 29, 2010

All the informed people I know (here's one) think that WebP is not a particularly good compression scheme.
posted by dfan at 7:13 PM on October 29, 2010

WebP or whatever you call it not only has poor resolution, it fucks up the colour. Of course, if Google's tests say that 90% of people just won't notice, then undoubtedly we'll be looking at shit for the next twenty years.


The thing about kern fonting serif design people is that they just don't get why it doesn't matter.

You think anyone cares if the kerning on a stop sign is bad ? No. It says stop. Nobody gives a fuck what the font looks like as long as it's well understood what should happen when the sign appears. If that happens, the sign did it's job.

That's good design. Tell people what they need to know == fucking win. The rest is fickle fucking fashion for fucktard font fetishists.

Do Ceiling cats need to be rendered in perfect color ? No. Does it matter if that lame photoshop of Dick Cheney's head on a giraffe has messed up compression artifacts ? No. I can haz cheezburger is just as funny with whatever stupid encoding you go with as long as it renders.

That's good photo compression. Show people Teh Funnay Teh Fast == fucking win. The rest is is Phickle phucking phashion phor phucktard photo phetishists.

"Creative Design" people get themselves worked up over the most meaningless bullshit. There are really important things happening in the world. Did you see that Ghostcrawler nerfed Bear tanks ? HOLY WHAT THE HELL, BLIZZ!?!?!

Which is to say, there is nothing stopping you from using what you like when you feel its important. WTFGAS if everyone else uses sloppy compression on their stupid myspace banner ?
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:23 PM on October 29, 2010 [10 favorites]

Yea, this will go down well. It's based on the VP8 engine which performed badly when compared to x264.
posted by Old'n'Busted at 7:35 PM on October 29, 2010

Well fucking said, Pogo Fuzzybutt. Eloquently fucking stated, fuck, ya!
posted by five fresh fish at 7:43 PM on October 29, 2010

(actually, no.)
posted by five fresh fish at 7:43 PM on October 29, 2010 [8 favorites]

fickle fucking fashion for fucktard font fetishists.
Phickle phucking phashion phor phucktard photo phetishists.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:23 PM on October 29

I love you. I absolutely love photographs in all of their zoomable hi-rez detail and shit. But I love you now too.
posted by yesster at 7:45 PM on October 29, 2010

I really wish Google luck in this; images are 90% of web bandwidth, so anything they can do to speed things up, awesome.

That said-- there are three places where you've gotta make this stick to even be remotely useful.

1. "Save for Web" in Photoshop, make it one of the defaults in that dropdown, you know the one I'm talking about.

2. Windows XP.

3. Get some figurehead for hipster designers like Santa Maria or Powazek to declare it the thing to do. That bubbles down to shit-design-magazines a la Mashable, then down to rudimentary Wordpress template designers. Blammo, you have a major part of the web rendered as WebP.
posted by mark242 at 8:03 PM on October 29, 2010

Certainly a master image should be in a lossless format but when file size is any concern at all, what else should you use besides JPEG? In most of the software I use, setting JPEG "quality" at 95% makes the file size significantly smaller than a PNG, usually without any noticeable artifacts. The miser in me can't stand to waste the bandwidth / disk space on an ephemeral 5% improvement in the image... unless, again, it's my master copy of the image.

JPEG quality isn't a percentage. If you compress an image into a JPEG with a quality parameter of 100, it still won't be identical to the original image. Some programs express the number to you as a percentage, but these programs are lying. The reference implementation of the encoder took a quality parameter that went up to 100, but it wasn't ever intended to be a percentage.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the quality parameter isn't even linear in regards to the actual quality of the result.
posted by Kalthare at 8:36 PM on October 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

That "almost-certainly-a-shill guy" is Jason Garrett-Glaser, one of the lead developers of x264, an open source implementation of H.264. He knows exactly what he is talking about when it comes to image quality.

Well, yes... and he basically the go to guy for ragging on any format that is not h264.
posted by Artw at 8:41 PM on October 29, 2010

You think anyone cares if the kerning on a stop sign is bad ? No. It says stop.

That's what the world used to think. The world was wrong. In the US, we had the FHWA Series of fonts (commonly known as Highway Gothic) for highway signs. In the UK, you had Transport Were they optimal?

Hell, no.

How did they figure this out? Testing. The result -- you want large counter spaces, high x-height, different versions of the font for dark-on-light and light-on-dark applications, and to make sure that l and O don't look like 1 and 0 -- at 60 mph.

End result? Clearview. Even with bad halation blur, it's vastly more readable. Traveling at speed, the average person can read a highway sign in Clearview one to two *seconds* farther away (that is, they'll need to travel at their current speed for one to two seconds) than Highway Gothic or Transport.

So, yes, the kerning on a stop sign is imporant -- if that same kerning is used on other signs that you cannot immediatly grasp the meaning of without reading the sign.

It's easy to spot a stop sign. You can spot one without the ability to read, for fucks sake. It's red, it has eight sides, stop.

The sign on I-44E indicating that you need to continue on I-55N to reach Downtown Illinois*, that's another matter.


* Writing Chicago would have been much simpler....
posted by eriko at 8:44 PM on October 29, 2010 [43 favorites]

There's room enough in this world for those who prefer to drink 33-year-old scotch, and also for those who are perfectly happy with PBR and Mountain Dew.
posted by crunchland at 8:49 PM on October 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

Well, yes... and he basically the go to guy for ragging on any format that is not h264.

Anybody that writes as much high-quality code as he does, maintains a sense of humor about technology, and helps save people as much time and hassle as x264 does is more than welcome to rag on whatever he likes.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 8:53 PM on October 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

"Creative Design" people get themselves worked up over the most meaningless bullshit.

But getting worked up over "meaningless bullshit" is what separates a creative person from the average person.

I mean, what makes Tom Keller the best chef in America? The fact he gives a fuck about meaningless bullshit, like the quality of ingredients, or how a fish is butchered, or how his waitstaff dress. If I gave you the option of having dinner on me at French Laundry or dinner on me at Shoney's, you'd take French Laundry every single time. Hell, if I told you you've have to pay for the wine yourself you'd still take French Laundry.

Yeah, we all laugh about Jason Santa Maria's hipster designer image and roll our eyes at Khoi Vinh's grids. But end of the day, who do you want doing your site, Santa Maria or your cousin's son who built a website for his My Chemical Romance cover band that's mostly badly done Flash?

You'd take that hipster designer and all his designer-cool shit because he knows what the fuck he's doing and people will go Hey You Had Your Site Done By Santa Maria and not Whose Cousin's Son Threw That Shit Up For You.

And don't tell me you wouldn't. Because you would. Just like when someone special comes to town you'll take them to a good restaurant and not Olive Garden. The good restaurant is not going to shovel shit onto oversize dinner plates with bottomless breadsticks and call it "good." They're going to care about a bunch of meaningless shit you think is completely useless for your everyday life.

So yeah. Have your WebP. Have your cheap-ass Kroger brand hot dog on a crappy bun. I'll keep my JPEG, the Chicago fuckin' hot dog of web graphics formats. With sport peppers, fucker.
posted by dw at 8:56 PM on October 29, 2010 [8 favorites]

If you compress an image into a JPEG with a quality parameter of 100, it still won't be identical to the original image.

Wow, that's horrendous... I had always assumed that setting it to 100 was a lossless storage because the file comes out twice the size of the same image as a .gif or .png (which are lossless formats, right?)
posted by XMLicious at 9:05 PM on October 29, 2010

images are 90% of web bandwidth

You mean unsolicited commercial email.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:22 PM on October 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

The details aren't just details; they're what separate crap from gold. If we can do better we ought to change it before the web gets really popular and hard to upgrade.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 9:27 PM on October 29, 2010

I do not believe that I could possibly disagree more with Pogo_Fuzzybutt.
posted by spock at 9:56 PM on October 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Put another way, if Pogo_Fuzzybutt's sentiment is accurate then why aren't all magazines printed on newsprint? Surely that would be "good enough".
posted by spock at 9:59 PM on October 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

or how his waitstaff dress

Actually, I think that's independent of his skills as a chef.
posted by kenko at 9:59 PM on October 29, 2010

I really wish Google luck in this; images are 90% of web bandwidth, so anything they can do to speed things up, awesome.

Images are most certainly not 90% of web bandwidth. Video is.

Did you see this data? 20% of peak US internet use -- Netflix streaming!
posted by effugas at 10:35 PM on October 29, 2010

And, for the record, I'm not wildly interested in another image format that doesn't give us >8bpp and integrated lossless. What we really want is a better format for cameras to shoot in, so they don't need to keep inventing more RAW formats. Adobe's Digital Negative is nice for this but is so custom that nothing can integrate it properly.

I must admit I have a thing for JPEG XR, formerly Microsoft's HD Photo.

The big advantage of WebP is if you've already implemented WebM, it's basically a single I frame. In other words it's hard NOT to have already implemented WebP.
posted by effugas at 10:37 PM on October 29, 2010

I had always assumed that setting it to 100 was a lossless storage because the file comes out twice the size of the same image as a .gif or .png (which are lossless formats, right?)

PNG is lossless, and GIF can be lossless. The issue with GIF is that you can only have a maximum of 256 different colors in the image -- perfectly fine for simpler illustrations or black-and-white photos, but you lose significant color information for just about anything else.

Here's a simple image I whipped up to show the differences. I saved the original screencap in BMP, JPG, GIF, and PNG from MS Paint (v6.1), then zoomed in on them in Windows Photo Viewer and screencapped (because MS Paint's enlarge function messes with things).

You can clearly see the limitations of GIF: posterization and bloated file size. JPG did pretty well, but the reds are muddled and there's significant bleeding on the solid color boxes. PNG is identical to BMP (the uncompressed image), but more than 25 times smaller.

Certainly a master image should be in a lossless format but when file size is any concern at all, what else should you use besides JPEG?

For photographs, sure, but there are a lot of other types of images on the web that would benefit from being encoded to another file type.
posted by clorox at 10:42 PM on October 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

Wow, that's horrendous... I had always assumed that [jpeg setting] 100 was a lossless storage

Huh? JPEG is everyone's favorite example of lossy compression! There's no setting that makes it lossless, just like there's no magic MP3 bitrate that encodes lossless audio. The way these compression schemes work pretty much precludes lossless compression.
posted by ryanrs at 11:20 PM on October 29, 2010

Yes, I know that JPEG is the standard example of lossy compression. With general file compression tools there's usually a "no compression" option that simply packs the files into a single container without shrinking them, somewhat like the way a .tar archive works; it didn't seem like a totally unreasonable inference to imagine a JPEG doing something similar, especially when it's producing a file twice as large as a lossless compression.
posted by XMLicious at 11:36 PM on October 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Inspector.Gadget writes "Anybody that writes as much high-quality code as he does, maintains a sense of humor about technology, and helps save people as much time and hassle as x264 does is more than welcome to rag on whatever he likes."

Vaccination? Dis conventional medicine while promoting Homoeopathy? Evolution? Brilliant people in one area are often clueless how unbrilliant they are in other areas; not to say that's the case here but being brilliant shouldn't give someone carte blanche.
posted by Mitheral at 12:04 AM on October 30, 2010

Huh? JPEG is everyone's favorite example of lossy compression! There's no setting that makes it lossless, just like there's no magic MP3 bitrate that encodes lossless audio. The way these compression schemes work pretty much precludes lossless compression.

The JPEG (Joint Pictures Experts Group) actually did specify a lossless mode for JPEG -- you are correct, actually, that the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) doesn't actually allow for efficient encoding of lossless imagery, so the lossless modes don't use it.

Unfortunately, that also means that it's a high bar to pass, to support lossless JPEG. So most implementations don't.
posted by effugas at 2:00 AM on October 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Holy crap: Lossless JPEG.

Apparently it wasn't even supported by libjpeg's cjpeg and djpeg (the JPEG reference implementation, more or less). No wonder few have ever heard of it.
posted by ryanrs at 3:11 AM on October 30, 2010

TUGS! Most of my childhood is a fucking blur but Tugs and Thomas the Tank Engine are crystal clear. I don't even care what this article is about - I support it.

Am I wrong in thinking videos are just lots and lots of images?
posted by doublehappy at 3:25 AM on October 30, 2010

doublehappy,

You are. Video compression tends to include three types of frames:

• I-Frames, which are independent of any others and are indeed very much like JPEGs
• P-Frames, which are dependent on previous frames -- they're basically a backwards looking diff
• B-Frames, which are bidirectionally dependent, i.e. they require the decoder to know the past and the future to reconstruct the frame.

P and B frames are actually quite complex, but offer huge improvements in compression. WebP is basically the WebM I-Frame.
posted by effugas at 4:36 AM on October 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

I amuses me slightly that Chrome does not support this format. The high bar to replace jpeg is all the existing point and shoot cameras. Take an easy case, can you imagine Sony replacing essentially the universal standard with one they did not invent? Not a short term project.
posted by sammyo at 5:38 AM on October 30, 2010

Google probably don't really care about whether photoshop or Sony support this, all they want is for browsers to support it so they can transcode all the images they send down the pipe into it and save a bunch of bandwidth. If other people happen to start using it as well then I guess that's nice.

And when I read the x264 guys criticism a while back I remember being not all that convinced. He cut a big image down to tiny size and from memory they all ended up looking pretty ordinary. You were looking at compression noise in all the pictures, and it comes down to whether you want blurry compression or blocky compression. A more interesting comparison is how small can you make an image before it looks terrible not comparing how terrible several way over-compressed images look.
posted by markr at 6:02 AM on October 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ten years ago, when my 56K modem was practically catching fire from working so hard, this would have been most welcome news. But now it's 2010, my DSL line is idle most of the time and the thing I would like to see signifucantly reduced isn't image file sizes, it's the number of ads.

Given this is from Google, and knowing Google's business model, I can't help but wonder if this isn't designed to make ads even smaller and easier to inject into pages.
posted by tommasz at 6:31 AM on October 30, 2010

Background music at the Googleplex:
Wim-o-webP o-wim-o-webP o-wim-o-webP o-wim-o-webP o-wim-o-webP In the jungle, the mighty jungle..
posted by Lanark at 6:36 AM on October 30, 2010

Brilliant people in one area are often clueless how unbrilliant they are in other areas; not to say that's the case here but being brilliant shouldn't give someone carte blanche.

The dude wrote a lot of x264. Image coding is precisely his area of expertise.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 7:32 AM on October 30, 2010

Do Ceiling cats need to be rendered in perfect color ? No. Does it matter if that lame photoshop of Dick Cheney's head on a giraffe has messed up compression artifacts ? No. I can haz cheezburger is just as funny with whatever stupid encoding you go with as long as it renders.

No offense, but that's bullshit. Compression JPG artifacts look like shit. I hate seeing images that have been over-compressed. It's just ugly. It actually makes human faces ugly, making it look like they have blemishes.
posted by delmoi at 9:26 AM on October 30, 2010

or how his waitstaff dress

Actually, I think that's independent of his skills as a chef.

kenko: "chef" means "head, boss". It actually has nothing to do with cooking, except that there is only one "chef" in a restaurant full of cooks. So, yes: the chef can be in charge of controlling waitstaff dress. He's in charge of the entire food prep/presentation show.
posted by IAmBroom at 11:22 AM on October 30, 2010

Oops: I meant to say: "chef" means "head, boss" in the original French.
posted by IAmBroom at 11:23 AM on October 30, 2010

Inspector.Gadget writes "The dude wrote a lot of x264. Image coding is precisely his area of expertise."

I know. The comment was "... welcome to rag on whatever he likes."
posted by Mitheral at 11:42 AM on October 30, 2010

They seem to be very focused on the speed of pages, I've heard from some that it impacts ranking now too.
posted by Geoffk at 12:28 PM on October 30, 2010

Yes, the main reason we care about this kind of thing is latency (how fast your pages load). Much of my time at work is spent shaving tens or hundreds of milliseconds off page load / video load times. While this certainly helps people, I'd say that web speed is almost a fetish at Google. Bandwidth reduction is a secondary / associated benefit.
posted by wildcrdj at 2:12 PM on October 30, 2010

If I were Google I'd want faster loading sites to have a ranking advantage, too. Add five seconds in your mind to every page load today and see how different your user experience is. If Google is your de facto portal to those pages it's easy to associate your page load frustration with the first, fifth, seventh, nineteenth page you see. My mum for a while thought that to be searchable on Google you were hosted (well, her perception of "hosted") on Google and this informed her web browsing experience. So, "speeding up the Internet" provides a massive improvement in user experience. Sure it helps too that it means we see their ads much faster and don't mind clicking them and loading a new page, and that smaller files mean less server and bandwidth use...
posted by doublehappy at 2:35 PM on October 30, 2010

griphus: "WebP? I think it could make quite a splash. Maybe even get to Number 1!"

Sorry, these jokes expired after the Wii was released.
posted by IndigoRain at 12:17 AM on October 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

You think anyone cares if the kerning on a stop sign is bad ? No. It says stop. Nobody gives a fuck what the font looks like as long as it's well understood what should happen when the sign appears. If that happens, the sign did it's job

God, yes, why try to do anything well at all? Do the bare minimum so you can afford your trailer and then spend all day inside it masturbating.
posted by bonaldi at 6:10 AM on October 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Can we all agree to use JPEG for photos and PNG for graphics (i.e. everything that isn't a photo)? Please?
posted by alasdair at 9:44 AM on October 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

To those that are having a hard time believing these statistics about the percentage of web traffic devoted to image, notice that everyone keeps saying "web traffic", not "internet traffic". So these percentages are not taking into account things like NetFlix, BitTorrent, etc. I would hope that they are taking into account things like embedded videos, Flash games, and the like; otherwise it's kind of a misleading number to quote.

Speaking of Ceiling Cats, I think icanhascheezburger.com is a perfect example of a place where a lot of quality is lost in the name of bandwidth. For many of the pics, it doesn't really matter much, but I don't know how many times I've been frustrated by seeing a picture on one of the sites that is hosted on cheezburger.com and not been able to get a good look at what was going on.

Usually it's from ThereIFixedIt.com, and I'll be looking at some bizarre, jury-rigged device someone's thrown together, and I'm sitting there squinting at my computer screen trying to figure out what that little gray blob is that's been attached to the toilet flush handle with some kind of wire (is that a coat hanger?) and seems to be held in place by duct — wait, is that tape or a strip of cloth? Dammit, I can't even tell why this is supposed to be funny! It's enough to drive me crazy. Of course, there, it's because of a forced resolution limit, but I can easily imagine the same problems arising from overzealous compression artifacts.

It's easy to think that design doesn't matter because you don't ever notice it making a difference. But good design is meant to not be noticed. That doesn't mean it has no effect on your experience. Badly kerned text reads slowly and is hard to pick out at a distance. It's often a subtle thing. If, like me*, you're not the sort of person who has trained their brain to pick out design problems, you don't notice anything different. You just read it a little more slowly than you could have or squint a little bit more.

On the other hand, sometimes it is okay to sacrifice quality design, provided it gets us something else. We've already committed to some loss in quality just by using jpegs to begin with, so the question is just where to draw that line. If you're going to take Mr Garret-Glaser's comparisons as an argument against ever using WebP, then you're kind of missing the point. There are many situations where I cannot tell the difference, after very, very careful inspection). So the question I have is "Of the images that we would switch over to WebP format as Google suggests, how many are going to be similar to the examples that Google gave (of essentially indistinguishable results) as opposed to the examples that Mr Garret-Glaser gave (of subtle, but not insignificant quality loss)?" Once we know that, then we can start having the deeper quality v. bandwidth debate.

*I occasionally will spot a bad kerning problem or an imperfectly masked greenscreen effect or something, but for me it's more "Hey, I just noticed a design thingy! Aren't I cool!" and less "This is so terrible, I must complain!"
posted by ErWenn at 7:30 PM on October 31, 2010 [1 favorite]