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One big problem I have with the image/video format zoo in the browsers is that it becomes an incredible complicated task to get the media out of the browser in

One big problem I have with the image/video format zoo in the browsers is that it becomes an incredible complicated task to get the media out of the browser in a format all the other software can work with. It would be amazing if the browsers offered a built-in „Download & Convert“ feature for images and videos. Pages automatically defaulting to webp so you try to send the link through a messenger and you might notice that it doesn‘t work for everyone, either iOS users can‘t see it or the messenger interprets it strangely. So you try to save the image and send that, same problem, you get the webp image…

Daemon404 5y ago
Chrome does seem to save the JPEG version on some WebP or AVIF URLs where there is also a JPEG version available too, although it seems to be 'clever' about it rather than explicitly offering the option, which can make saving the actual WebP or AVIF mildly annoying.
- traspler 5y ago
  I've noticed this too but I couldn't determine any clear patterns. It's also very confusing when the file ending in the URL does not match what I download (that's why an explicit "save as" might be better than an implicit auto conversion). I think I also had situations where it did the opposite, download the webp even though the URL had jpeg in the name. I assumed that it's the webserver serving the image being too clever.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jonsneyers 5y ago
I agree with this, and I think for this reason it is best if a new codec gets wide adoption also outside browsers, instead of having the approach of a "web codec" where it suffices that servers and browsers know about it but the wider ecosystem doesn't support it. WebP in particular, as the name suggests, was conceived as an "image format for the web" and while I think it's good to have the web in mind when designing an image codec, I think it's a bad idea to limit the scope like that. Design decisions like limiting the maximum dimensions and bit depth at the codec level "because that's all the web needs" plus limited attention/focus to adoption outside browsers does lead to the phenomenon you describe where "it doesn't work for everyone", causing the small gain of improved compression to be dwarfed by the huge inconvenience of breaking workflows. Any new codec of course has this problem even if they do target wide adoption (like JPEG XL): adoption is never instantaneous. It is a fact that the release cycle of browsers is more suitable for innovation than that of most other software, so it does make sense to start there even when it will still cause things to break in software that doesn't support it yet. To mitigate that, I think it would help a lot of browsers would have a "Save As..." dialog box on images that gives users the choice to save the actual image in whatever format it is in, or to convert it to PNG or JPEG.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  > It is a fact that the release cycle of browsers is more suitable for innovation than that of most other software, Also there is a huge financial incentive for large web hosting companies (e.g. Google, Facebook) to adopt compression formats that save bandwidth, using automated tools to apply those wherever possible. People making e.g. image archives or building image capture hardware are going to be slower. They don’t want to use new untested technologies that might not succeed, and they don’t want to switch more frequently than necessary. When they do transition it will be by applying new technologies to new images but not immediately transforming older images to use the new technology.
  - jonsneyers 5y ago
    True — which is one of the reasons why JPEG XL includes a risk-free JPEG recompression option: if needed, you can just undo it and get the bit-exact same JPEG files back. Applying lossy recompression on already-lossy-compressed images is something you should avoid at all cost, since it inevitably causes generation loss (and it is also likely to not be very effective, since you're basically spending a lot of bits in the new codec on replicating compression artifacts of the old codec).
  - JyrkiAlakuijala 5y ago
    Happy users, faster growing userbase, more e-store revenue, higher click-through rates, lower latency, better quality-of-experience, or more 7-day-returning users can be more important financial incentives than bandwidth. Humans are more than thousands of times more valuable than a computer. When image quality and observed latency are at a level where users don't care even subconsciously (say, images look like camera originals and load in 100 ms), then bandwidth cost optimization may become a good 2nd objective.
    - fshr 5y ago
      This is a strange argument. The larger companies have plenty of people to work on all the things you mentioned plus bandwidth optimizations. Also, they’re rarely the same people.
lostgame 5y ago
Google Image search even does this! Incredibly annoying - only to go to the source image itself and find it to be JPEG or PNG. Very confused as to why this is done - anyone?
philo23 5y ago
I've noticed sometimes that when Cloudflare optimises images and serves up their own WebP versions of your existing images, if you go to save it you get the original jpg/png back. Presumably the HTTP request that gets sent when you save an image sends different Accept headers. Doesn't seem to work all the time, but presumably thats down to a combination of different Cloudflare settings, origin server configuration and what format the original image were in too.
- tyingq 5y ago
  My guess is that the HTTP client request, when you do right click "Save Image As", is sent with Cache-Control:no-cache and Pragma:no-cache headers. Which bypasses Cloudflare.
  - jonsneyers 5y ago
    I think it just re-requests without the "Accept: image/webp" in the request header, so you get whatever the server would have sent to a browser that doesn't know about WebP.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      That seems like it would have to be an unusual hardcoded path in the browser's code. I can't figure out why it would do that.
      - jandrese 5y ago
        Too many complaints that they downloaded a picture from the web that their image viewer can't open maybe?
CyberShadow 5y ago
> It would be amazing if the browsers offered a built-in „Download & Convert“ feature for images and videos. In a way, they already do for images: right-click and "Copy". In some desktop environments, you can even paste that directly into a folder to save it as a file. Dolphin allows choosing which format (of those that the browser can convert to) to save it in.
h0nd 5y ago
At the same time content providers are trying to make it as difficult as possible to 'steal' their videos and images.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> At the same time content providers are trying to make it as difficult as possible to 'steal' their videos and images. Well, screenshot is a thing for images. Video is another story.
  - BEEdwards 5y ago
    OBS works great for screenshoting videos.
- dylan604 5y ago
  I like how you put steal in quotes to minimize the fact that is what you are doing. If you walk into an art gallery or musuem, you can't just take art of the wall and walk out with it. Just because the gallery is a website, people feel like they can just right-click and save as and walk out the door with it. Yet, people understand that highlighting text copy&pasting it into their own work is plagiarism. I honestly do not understand the disconnect. If the website felt like the imagery should be free for people to do what they want with, then they would provide a link to a higher quality image rather than a highly compressed one.
  - desiderantes 5y ago
    Wonky comparison, as plagiarism involves claiming authorship/evading citing, not literally copying text and keeping it somewhere else. I CAN go and copy text from any textbook into my notebook without consequences, why couldn't I download a copy of an image?
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Did you ask for permission and were granted permission to take that image from the server for any other use than for viewing in a browser? What is the purpose of downloading the image? To share with friends? Why not send a link to the site? To use a desktop background? Did you pay to license for that use? To store on your phone for your own personal enjoyment? Again, why not reload the website?
Geee 5y ago
What would be even more amazing, is that browsers would compress / convert formats on upload. Especially video. It's stupid to upload gigabytes of raw video to a server which then compresses it to a few megabytes.
- dylan604 5y ago
  If you're willing for your video to suffer quality from bad compression settings because your browser is a "dumb" tool that just applies some preconfigured compression scheme, then great. Also, how many people are going to accept that instead of just uploading files and seeing immediate progress vs waiting for a browser to compress a file from some sub-$500 laptop? What codec is it encoding to? H.265? good luck getting that to complete this week on that cheap laptop.
dangerface 5y ago
Yea its awful the number of sites that use .jpg but its actualy a webp with the wrong extension, like thanks I hate it.
- slig 5y ago
  Thanks Clouflare for that.
vbezhenar 5y ago
It is a bad idea with lossy compression. Every convertation will make quality worse.
krzyk 5y ago
Really? I find browsers as a software that recognizes fewest number of image formats. ImageMagick is just few keystroke away and you can convert to almost any format you like.
p410n3 5y ago
I always hated when people sent me screenshots instead of just downloading the images, but for the reasons you mentioned I know often find myself screenshotting stuff.... At least I cut the image so it's not obvious
nine_k 5y ago
Desktop Firefox already has it. Right click — "Copy image" — paste into any program that supports PNG. On Android though this is not the case.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Really? I'm getting "your browser does not support JPEG XL" in Firefox.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    I mean the way to export an arbitrary image in an open format, not JPEG XL support yet.
  - jonsneyers 5y ago
    You can try Firefox Nightly with the jxl flag enabled...
Osiris 5y ago
Reminds me of the native plugin days where based on mine type, a plugin would handle the content. Could WASM in an extension be good enough for some use cases like this?

Daemon404 5y ago

Chrome does seem to save the JPEG version on some WebP or AVIF URLs where there is also a JPEG version available too, although it seems to be 'clever' about it rather than explicitly offering the option, which can make saving the actual WebP or AVIF mildly annoying.

traspler 5y ago
I've noticed this too but I couldn't determine any clear patterns. It's also very confusing when the file ending in the URL does not match what I download (that's why an explicit "save as" might be better than an implicit auto conversion). I think I also had situations where it did the opposite, download the webp even though the URL had jpeg in the name. I assumed that it's the webserver serving the image being too clever.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jonsneyers 5y ago

I agree with this, and I think for this reason it is best if a new codec gets wide adoption also outside browsers, instead of having the approach of a "web codec" where it suffices that servers and browsers know about it but the wider ecosystem doesn't support it. WebP in particular, as the name suggests, was conceived as an "image format for the web" and while I think it's good to have the web in mind when designing an image codec, I think it's a bad idea to limit the scope like that. Design decisions like limiting the maximum dimensions and bit depth at the codec level "because that's all the web needs" plus limited attention/focus to adoption outside browsers does lead to the phenomenon you describe where "it doesn't work for everyone", causing the small gain of improved compression to be dwarfed by the huge inconvenience of breaking workflows. Any new codec of course has this problem even if they do target wide adoption (like JPEG XL): adoption is never instantaneous. It is a fact that the release cycle of browsers is more suitable for innovation than that of most other software, so it does make sense to start there even when it will still cause things to break in software that doesn't support it yet. To mitigate that, I think it would help a lot of browsers would have a "Save As..." dialog box on images that gives users the choice to save the actual image in whatever format it is in, or to convert it to PNG or JPEG.

jacobolus 5y ago
> It is a fact that the release cycle of browsers is more suitable for innovation than that of most other software, Also there is a huge financial incentive for large web hosting companies (e.g. Google, Facebook) to adopt compression formats that save bandwidth, using automated tools to apply those wherever possible. People making e.g. image archives or building image capture hardware are going to be slower. They don’t want to use new untested technologies that might not succeed, and they don’t want to switch more frequently than necessary. When they do transition it will be by applying new technologies to new images but not immediately transforming older images to use the new technology.
- jonsneyers 5y ago
  True — which is one of the reasons why JPEG XL includes a risk-free JPEG recompression option: if needed, you can just undo it and get the bit-exact same JPEG files back. Applying lossy recompression on already-lossy-compressed images is something you should avoid at all cost, since it inevitably causes generation loss (and it is also likely to not be very effective, since you're basically spending a lot of bits in the new codec on replicating compression artifacts of the old codec).
- JyrkiAlakuijala 5y ago
  Happy users, faster growing userbase, more e-store revenue, higher click-through rates, lower latency, better quality-of-experience, or more 7-day-returning users can be more important financial incentives than bandwidth. Humans are more than thousands of times more valuable than a computer. When image quality and observed latency are at a level where users don't care even subconsciously (say, images look like camera originals and load in 100 ms), then bandwidth cost optimization may become a good 2nd objective.
  - fshr 5y ago
    This is a strange argument. The larger companies have plenty of people to work on all the things you mentioned plus bandwidth optimizations. Also, they’re rarely the same people.

lostgame 5y ago

Google Image search even does this! Incredibly annoying - only to go to the source image itself and find it to be JPEG or PNG. Very confused as to why this is done - anyone?

philo23 5y ago

I've noticed sometimes that when Cloudflare optimises images and serves up their own WebP versions of your existing images, if you go to save it you get the original jpg/png back. Presumably the HTTP request that gets sent when you save an image sends different Accept headers. Doesn't seem to work all the time, but presumably thats down to a combination of different Cloudflare settings, origin server configuration and what format the original image were in too.

tyingq 5y ago
My guess is that the HTTP client request, when you do right click "Save Image As", is sent with Cache-Control:no-cache and Pragma:no-cache headers. Which bypasses Cloudflare.
- jonsneyers 5y ago
  I think it just re-requests without the "Accept: image/webp" in the request header, so you get whatever the server would have sent to a browser that doesn't know about WebP.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    That seems like it would have to be an unusual hardcoded path in the browser's code. I can't figure out why it would do that.
    - jandrese 5y ago
      Too many complaints that they downloaded a picture from the web that their image viewer can't open maybe?

CyberShadow 5y ago

> It would be amazing if the browsers offered a built-in „Download & Convert“ feature for images and videos. In a way, they already do for images: right-click and "Copy". In some desktop environments, you can even paste that directly into a folder to save it as a file. Dolphin allows choosing which format (of those that the browser can convert to) to save it in.

h0nd 5y ago

At the same time content providers are trying to make it as difficult as possible to 'steal' their videos and images.

phkahler 5y ago
>> At the same time content providers are trying to make it as difficult as possible to 'steal' their videos and images. Well, screenshot is a thing for images. Video is another story.
- BEEdwards 5y ago
  OBS works great for screenshoting videos.
dylan604 5y ago
I like how you put steal in quotes to minimize the fact that is what you are doing. If you walk into an art gallery or musuem, you can't just take art of the wall and walk out with it. Just because the gallery is a website, people feel like they can just right-click and save as and walk out the door with it. Yet, people understand that highlighting text copy&pasting it into their own work is plagiarism. I honestly do not understand the disconnect. If the website felt like the imagery should be free for people to do what they want with, then they would provide a link to a higher quality image rather than a highly compressed one.
- desiderantes 5y ago
  Wonky comparison, as plagiarism involves claiming authorship/evading citing, not literally copying text and keeping it somewhere else. I CAN go and copy text from any textbook into my notebook without consequences, why couldn't I download a copy of an image?
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Did you ask for permission and were granted permission to take that image from the server for any other use than for viewing in a browser? What is the purpose of downloading the image? To share with friends? Why not send a link to the site? To use a desktop background? Did you pay to license for that use? To store on your phone for your own personal enjoyment? Again, why not reload the website?

Geee 5y ago

What would be even more amazing, is that browsers would compress / convert formats on upload. Especially video. It's stupid to upload gigabytes of raw video to a server which then compresses it to a few megabytes.

dylan604 5y ago
If you're willing for your video to suffer quality from bad compression settings because your browser is a "dumb" tool that just applies some preconfigured compression scheme, then great. Also, how many people are going to accept that instead of just uploading files and seeing immediate progress vs waiting for a browser to compress a file from some sub-$500 laptop? What codec is it encoding to? H.265? good luck getting that to complete this week on that cheap laptop.

dangerface 5y ago

Yea its awful the number of sites that use .jpg but its actualy a webp with the wrong extension, like thanks I hate it.

slig 5y ago
Thanks Clouflare for that.

vbezhenar 5y ago

It is a bad idea with lossy compression. Every convertation will make quality worse.

krzyk 5y ago

Really? I find browsers as a software that recognizes fewest number of image formats. ImageMagick is just few keystroke away and you can convert to almost any format you like.

p410n3 5y ago

I always hated when people sent me screenshots instead of just downloading the images, but for the reasons you mentioned I know often find myself screenshotting stuff.... At least I cut the image so it's not obvious

nine_k 5y ago

Desktop Firefox already has it. Right click — "Copy image" — paste into any program that supports PNG. On Android though this is not the case.

Pxtl 5y ago
Really? I'm getting "your browser does not support JPEG XL" in Firefox.
- nine_k 5y ago
  I mean the way to export an arbitrary image in an open format, not JPEG XL support yet.
- jonsneyers 5y ago
  You can try Firefox Nightly with the jxl flag enabled...

Osiris 5y ago

Reminds me of the native plugin days where based on mine type, a plugin would handle the content. Could WASM in an extension be good enough for some use cases like this?