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.

  • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
    01·
    1 year ago

    Can you list at least a few? Everyone’s like “noooo my apps don’t support it” but nobody says what apps, what are y’all afraid to admit that you use MS Paint or what?

    • Matriks404@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      MSPaint literally opens WebP files, or at least it does in the most recent Windows 10 version (It doesn’t support saving them for some reason though).

      But I also don’t believe that most apps don’t use it, the only app on my system that doesn’t support WebP is the default Windows app, which is horrible anyway.

      But generally unless you use some very outdated software it should open webps just fine.

    • elephantium@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      I use MS paint on a regular basis! I play Civ succession games, so I take some screenshots of the game during my turns. I use Paint to crop them.

      The helper utility I’ve been using can save as bmp, png, gif, or jpg.

      The built-in Windows snipping tool can save as png, gif, jpg, or mht (which ends up being bmp under the hood).

      Hmm, it might just be time to find a replacement tool.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
        0·
        1 year ago

        Haha welcome to my another session of bitching about ancient media formats.

        Anyway I’ll just recommend XnView to you too. 500 supported image formats, so you can imagine why I get so pissy when people try to convince me that jpg and gif forevaaaa and that webp or whatever is difficult to implement. Maybe give LWF (Lura Wave Format) a shot, that stuff has been around for 20+ years too and can blow jpg out of the water.

        Oh XnView can do screenshots and cropping and stuff too. A free program that’s been around for 25 years, and for DOS before that. And yet the mainstream sticks to whatever nonsense is the default. It’s heartbreaking.

        • elephantium@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check it out.

          Mostly what I’m looking for is fire-and-forget screenshots. I’ll hit alt-printscreen to capture something during the between-turn processing, then go back and crop it and upload it later along with everything else. Tweaking that to a new hotkey -> select the area to screenshot would be fine, but I still want it to automatically save the screenshot in a folder. That was the “killer feature” of the screenie helper I’ve been using for ages.

          • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
            1·
            1 year ago

            Ok I’m not sure if XnView can automatically save a screenshot to a file (I don’t have a PC with me), but there are certainly lots of tools that can help with that too.