WebP to replace JPEG on Facebook

[Ink]

Source : Chicken meets egg with Facebook, Chrome WebP support

Attempts to use a new image format that replaces JPEG are met with user annoyance.

WebP is the Google-developed still image counterpart to Google's WebM video format. The underlying compression technology is broadly identical, but it has a feature set tailored to still images. Support for the format exists in Chrome and Opera, but little on the Web—aside from WebP advocacy sites.

That could change with moves by Facebook to support the format, but its early forays have met almost immediate criticism by users of the site. Facebook users discovered that while WebP may work in Chrome and Opera, it has negligible support everywhere else.

...

During the weekend, Facebook appeared to start serving some users WebP versions of images instead of the traditional JPEGs, first reported on CNET. The response was almost immediate complaining.

It turns out that Facebook users routinely do things like copy image URLs and save images locally. The use of WebP substantially defeated both of these use cases, because apart from Chrome and Opera, there's very little software that's in regular day-to-day use that supports WebP. As a result, users were left with unusable URLs and files; files they couldn't open locally, and URLs that didn't work in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari.

Until WebP support is universal, this situation will always be difficult.

Related:

• WebP (Google Dev)
  WebP (Wikipedia)

 

[jamescv7]

I'm better stick to jpeg, png and others as its the only traditional/widespread used for everyone and no complications since compatibility isn't an issue.

 

[Ink]

JPEG and PNG are different, because as one is meant for lossy compression the other is loseless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG

There may be some improvements in WebP over JPEG, but as it stands, it's not universal so it won't be widely accepted.

 

[Ink]

Looks like Google Chrome Web Store uses .webp to display uploaded images for extension pages. You may not be able to tell but the image below is just that (MyWOT used as example).

However, an issue I found was it's not yet supported (as common with new technologies) so couldn't upload the URL to my favourite image hosting site (imgur.com)