cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2207898
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.
Actually everything started like that with big companies that don’t do evil … open source … until it wasn’t anyone …
What are they gonna do, add proprietary extensions? Nobody will support those. It’s open, and it only works by being open. It’s actually in Google’s interests for it to be open, widespread, and an effective format because it saves them bandwidth and improves UX on their actual proprietary stuff like YouTube.