this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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I really don't get the WebP hate, it's a good format. It's better than PNG and JPG.
Though you couldn't set the bar any lower without it turning into a joke.
Anyhow, to quote Wikipedia:
All while having significantly increased complexity. The blurriness problem was inherited from the video codec webp was based on. When you can't beat an 18 years old format, don't be surprised when people get irritated when you use your position to get it mandated into a standard, while later stalling actual improvements (JPEG XL).
Is JXL in actual use? Is it supported? I reckon it's quite new, innit? D'you happen to.know how it compares to its peers?
It's not supported by either Chromium or Firefox, which is part of the issue (Google basically decided against it with arguments that are much better suited against WebP, which they pushed some years ago).
There aren't that many static image codec comparisons, for example there is https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/image-comparison/. https://afontenot.github.io/image-formats-comparison/ doesn't even include WebP because the test suite uses features unsupported by it (YUV 4:4:4). In the ones I do find, WebP usually wins against good JPEG at low bitrates, but loses on high bitrates because of the blurriness issue. They both get beaten by JPEG XL and AVIF. Which one is better probably depends on whom you ask. The before linked comparison prefers JPEG XL by a slim margin, https://tonisagrista.com/blog/2023/jpegxl-vs-avif/ strongly favors JPEG XL.
JPEG-XL exists, is factually better, and is not patent encumbered.
How is WebP "patent encumbered"? It's an open format.
Open is not the same as patent-free, the two things can coexist (and they do in the case of webp).
It's open to write the code, but in order to be authorized to use it you have to get a permit from Google. You can't eg.: fork from Firefox and use their permit (as you implicitly could with patent-free). Plus, Google can rescind their patent grant at any point, which they are bound to do once they secure ownership of the internet.
That’s just not true.
https://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/
Thanks for taking the time to disprove this
That's still not patent free. Heck it's right there: "irrevocable (unless we say so)".
I didn’t say it was patent free, and the text doesn’t say “unless we say so”. It explicitly says the only way the patent grants can be revoked is if you enter patent litigation or enforcement regarding this code.
That is still a problem, but what I was responding to:
is just wrong.
I have no problem with calling out Google’s anticompetitive behaviors, even in this case, but don’t lie about it.
Yes, but that is actually almost "incompatible with every app and website"
A file format can not, by itself, be "incompatible" with a website. What matters is the browser, and Firefox at least is adding support (slowly), and they are the ones who matter ATM.
does jpeg xl support animated images?
It does, yes, but from what I gather it's rather difficult to actually encode such an animated image compared to, say, a GIF. Display should work just fine.
It's just tech illiterate being "oh no my image program not open this 10 year old new format"
PNG is lossless, so isn't that like comparing apples to oranges?
Edit: Apparently webp can also be lossless. I don't know anything.
personally:
jxl would make a better replacement for this last thing since you can losslessly transcody jpgs with ~20% filesize and in my testing, pngs with ~50% (though jxl lossless decoding is cpu heavy right now), lossless transcoding also means you could keep jxls in server, then give it to the client if it supports jxl, or transcode back to jpg if they don't (this saves bandwidth and storage at the cost of some cpu usage, but jpg transcoding is really fast and you can cache highly used images)