Linux users: People have problems with web(p|m)? Huh, TIL.
I post a lot of gifs in my work chat because I’m a highly productive individual, but Teams doesn’t have webp support. I thought, “Well that’s silly, I’ll just convert them to gifs, but webp is clearly a stupid format.” Then I converted one, and it had terrible artefacting, choppy framerate, and was over 300% larger. Now I’m mad at Teams.
… only now‽
Have you tried using apng?
Yeah, GIF is an extremely old format and rarely used these days. You just still see files being called “.gif”, even though they’re APNG or MP4 or something else under the hood.
Every time I see this, it reminds me that webp is not good, it’s just better. And that an author of webp likely kept JPEG XL out of Chrome. What could have been…
Me talking about PNG in the late 90s. IE didn’t render certain features right (like transparency), and Adobe’s compressor in Photoshop sucked ass.
I’d so much love for webp support to increase
It’s so much better than sending jpegs to people
It’s a format published by Google without much industry input. I imagine, that’s why it isn’t seeing terribly much adoption.
AVIF and JPEG-XL might do better, but they’re still relatively young formats.
Apple created HIEC for themselves. They use it within their own gargantuan ecosystem to their own, personal benefit and to the benefit of people all-in on Apple devices. When it’s time to send it outside, they automatically gets converted to JPEG/MOV files.
They do not care if you like it or if you even use it.
they automatically gets converted to JPEG/MOV files
nope
They do, most of the time. For example if you upload an heic file from an iPhone to a file input on a website that doesn’t accept heic files, it’ll upload a jpeg.
Apple can’t see or control all the different ways of transferring files, though, so in practice it still causes problems sometimes.
The strange thing is that some Android phones also save photos as heic files and make no attempt to convert them, so I still had to add logic to my websites to convert them myself.
Heif is covered by patents in the mpegla patent pool of which apple is a member. They have a vested interest in it becoming mainstream.
My biggest gripe with Webp. If people just add support like Jpg, Png, Tiff, ect. then I could just use it like any other image without having to open with a browser.
Isn’t there an issue with webp where it could potentially run arbitrary code?
I actually held a presentation on it, yeah! It wasn’t really a webp problem, but an issue in the image decoder library which was used in basically… everything to open Webp. What happened was that you could tell the OS to build a super bad (Huffman Tree, which in turn led to the decoding not fitting in the allocated memory space and overflowing.
Didn’t every imaging lib have similar issues? They are always supposed to be fast and get implemented in C and humans fail memory management. Neverending story…
I see! Thank you for clearing that up.
“Can’t media format X run arbitrary code” is almost never an issue with the format itself and virtually always a bug with a particular decoder/player.
