this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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wdym "terrible quality loss"; for one their lossless beats PNG
They had a better joke, but they converted it to a Webp and lost the punchline.
This depends, if your image contains a lot of flat colours (like a screenshot of a website) then PNG can actually give you smaller file sizes than lossless webp. But for most images (especially ones with compression artefacts) lossless webp gives smaller sizes.
But that’s not got anything to do with quality. That’s compression size
Lossless encoding, by definition, won't have any quality loss.
Watch some startup "invent" a revolutionary lossless format that discards some information.
Xerox did that ages ago.
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning
Fuuuuuck. There goes another business idea. 😂
That's the point of revolution, no?
Going back to something that was in the past, except giving it a new name and context:P
Huh? The OP literally said “their lossless beats png” and then you proceeded to talk about file size which wasn’t ever part of the conversation. The conversation was about quality.
And if you already have compression artifacts, what use is lossless?
Only time you would want it is when you are uploading comparison photos specifically showing compression artifacts created from some other compression result.
That's a bit to niche to make it worthwhile.
To further reduce file size without further reducing quality.
There are probably billions of jpeg files out there in the world already encoded in lossy JPEG, with no corresponding higher quality version actually available (e.g., the camera that captures the image and immediately saves it as JPEG). We shouldn't simply accept that those file sizes are going to forever be stuck, and can think through codecs that further compress the file size losslessly from there.
Wait, so lossless webp manages to be smaller than even lossy jpg, while also having to losslessly reproduce jpeg artifacts, which tends to otherwise greatly increase file sizes (as compared to the original lossless file) in lossless formats?
JPEG XL has a mode for losslessly encoding any lossy JPEG into a smaller file size without any loss of quality. Wikipedia has some description of general approaches for losslessly encoding JPEG files further.
I don't know if webp uses any of these tricks, but I don't see why it would be hard to imagine that compression artifacts from a 30-year-old format can be encoded more efficiently today.
Lossless is fine, lossy is worse than JPEG.
If someone chooses lossy they deserve whatever torture they receive.
Unfortunately most people don't really have a choice in the matter. It's sites like twitter that crunch images to hell and back on upload that choose for us.
Choose life don't use webbed sites that use lossy webps