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.
Confession time: I didn’t realise webp was an image format - whenever searches came up with it, I assumed it was some shenanigans designed to prevent me stealing it … so I, um, took a screenshot of it,
In my defence, Windows doesn’t classify them as image files (rather as Internet Edge HTML Documents), and IrfanView32 (which you can tell is a great app 'cos its got ‘32’ in its name) doesn’t support them. I’ve since realised that GIMP and MS Paint do open them though.
Well, at least you now know, so that’s a few less png screenshots of photos in existence.
I remember IrfanView well, is that no longer developed? I’ve always preferred XnView which still exists and with its support for 500 image formats, ya’ll never never have a problem opening anything that has valid image data in it.
It’s still being developed by the look of it. I think I just have to get a different version of it from the one I’ve got. It was the first app I used that let me navigate through a directory’s pictures with the arrow keys, so that’s why I’ve got a soft spot for it.
IrfanView supports them via plugin.