Not backwards compatible.
We just add it to that nice cupboard "great advanced image formats we will forget about".
Society doesn't need a new image format. I'd wager to say not any new multimedia format. Big corporate entites do, and have churning them out at a steady pace.
Look at poor webp - a format pushed by the largest industry players - and the abysmal everyday use it gets, and the hate it generates.
They say it's technically compatible since older image decoders should recognize the PNG file is using a different compression algorithm than the default.
> Many programs already support the new PNG spec: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, iOS/macOS, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer...
This is intentionally ignoring the fact that there are countless PNG decoders out in the wild, many using libpng the standard decoder last updated 6 years ago; and they will not be able to read the new PNG v2 files.
They should have used a different file extension, PNG2, to distinguish this incompatible format. Otherwise, users will be confused why their newly saved PNG file cannot be read by certain existing programs.
Those are indeed the "magic" bytes of PNG. It's a very clever choice meant to ensure the transport layer didn't mess with it.
To start, there's a byte with the upper bit set which ensures an "8-bit clean" transport. If it's stripped, it becomes a harmless tab. Then the literal "PNG" text so you can see it in a text editor. Then a CR-LF pair to check for CR-LF to LF translations. Then, a CTRL-Z to stop display on DOS-like systems. And finally, another LF to check for LF to CR-LF translations.
It's a clever "magic" that basically ensures a binary transport layer. Things that mattered back in 1996.
It's clever but I'm not so sure it actually mattered - other formats have done just as well with simpler magic numbers. All it does in the end is that you get something that doesn't identify as a PNG file rather than a PNG file with bad data when a non-binary transport is used - both results are bad and immediately apparent.
Yes and no. It wasn't just about telling you a problem occurred, but failing early and being able to say exactly why. A "something in the chain is running in 7-bit mode" is more helpful than "CRC error in IDAT". Maybe the developers were being a bit too ambitious/hopeful, but an eight byte "magic" over a "simpler" four byte one isn't really worth crying over, even with 1996 download speeds.
Estimates are that 95% of Internet users have a browser that supports WebP and that ~25% of the top million websites serve WebP images. I wouldn't call that abysmal.
Not sure if that's version specific, but my one can (version 26.7.0) without any issues or warnings. Tried with this sample file: https://www.gstatic.com/webp/gallery/1.webp
I was about to write that Slack doesn't support webp but I just tested it and it does. For years I have been typing "convert file.webp file.jpg" and then posting that in slack but it looks like they have added support.
Or convert before you upload because the image host has delusions about fighting the Google monoculture by refusing WebP support. Even more of a head scratcher when WebM is their only video format.
on the contrary. on macOS apps don't have to support image (or movie) formats. it is done by the system and transparently handled by the APIs. apps automatically gain new formats when the system adds it.
And having to bring in support for formats that are deprecated by the OS, if they decide to keep supporting that format as there is sufficient demand from their users, is worse than having to bring in support for all formats rather than getting support from the OS?
Having ask that in a slightly confrontational way, one of the reasons I started using VLC all those years ago, and still use it to this day, was having trouble with other media players that relied on OS support fail to work well (or at all) with some codecs, while VLC brought support for them, and their dog, built-in and reliable. Dragging your own format support libraries with you can be beneficial.
I meant Windows, as macOS and Linux are usually good with modern things. It’s trivial to add the support if you don’t have it. I have no idea about Windows, but I got this vibe of someone using Win7 in 2025 and complaining the world moved on and keeps moving on.
I'm convinced that this is because of the prevalent MVP culture in modern software engineering. Instead of holistically looking at a new feature request such as "support webp images" we break it down into parts (e.g. "serve webp" "accept webp upload here" "accept webp upload there") and then we call it a MVP when only the highest priority items are done.
That doesn’t mean it’s dead, it rather shows sheer incompetence of the web dev departments of these wonderful companies for whom webp or avif aren’t images, I guess.
Maybe using VLC Media Player from an early age has left me with too high expectations.
But if I have a program designed to view or edit a certain class of file, and it doesn't support a certain file format, I will blame that program.
GIMP and Gwenview have supported webp (the latter via platform image plugins that add support to other applications as well) since before you encountered them online. Maybe choose better tools.
I could save my photos as BMPs like early digital cameras did but that doesn't make it practical or reasonable. My camera takes pictures as RAW or HEIF files. Why would I save my photos to a primarily lossy codec that's optimized and designed for distribution rather than preserving fidelity?
We used to do this with JPEG, in fact. And that's why many pictures on Facebook from pre-2018 or so all have a distinctive grainy look. It's artifacts on top of artifacts. Storage on phones isn't tight anymore, we don't need to store photos in a format meant to minimize bytes at the expense of quality.
There's more on Instagram than photos. Lotta meme pages, lot of people just uploading random screenshots and photos they downloaded that have been turned over a million times. Heck, all it takes is someone downloading their own photo from SocialMediaX to reupload on SocialMediaY, or just uploading a the WebP that they exported for their website.
Instagram hasn't even been primarily or even secondarily about photos for a long time. Indeed trying to "just" upload a photo is made super inconvenient these days.
Tangentially related but Instagram is really the worst plattform for photos. I don't understand why they crop and downsize (!) pictures. Not even Twitter does this, it's unironically a better photo plattform.
Unless you're uploading memes you've downloaded from elsewhere, this strictly isn't true. I'd consider myself an Instagram power user and the only thing that I and all the people I interact with is photos and videos. None of those are webp, or would have been worthwhile to save as webp as an intermediate format.
Could it be a lack of resources? Or some missing expertise? Maybe they could find some interns who are familiar with it? Maybe the entire world is so obsessed w AI, we don't even care about image formats anymore.
Honestly this kind of stuff happens all the time in large companies.
Interns won't want to work on a dead end like this. Moreso they need to be supervised by someone that doesn't want to get removed by being the lowest X% usefulness in a company. So all these existing tools that aren't primary revenue generators just sit on coast mode.
If you are using an image optimization service like Imgix / Cloudflare Image Resizing then it doesn't really matter, image can be uploaded as any supported format and will be sent to the end user according to their "Accept" header
Sure, ur then it’s my image viewer, my phones image viewer, the website I try and upload pictures to. This isn’t a problem you can solve by patching one application, and it’s not one the world as a whole cares about.
Better image formats serve entities who store images at scale, not end users.
I can tell you, I have personally worked with a global corporation and we estimated that for one of their websites, supporting the 3% that we exclude by using “modern standards” would be more costly than the amount of revenue they get from them. So in that case, it was a rational decision. And up to the 10% cut, management just didn’t want to do the extra investment. So if something falls below that 10% threshold, they just don’t care to get it fixed.
> it was a rational decision. And up to the 10% cut, management just didn’t want to do the extra investment
Rational, or economical? I find it rational to help someone in need since I'd want others to do the same to me, even if it's not financially profitable for me. Imo more factors flow into what's rational, but I understand what you mean by corporate greed working this way (less than 10% of people are blind, neither male nor female, run a free operating system or can't afford a new computer, etc., so yep they're not profitable groups and for-profits don't optimise for that)
You are using the notion of rationality wrong. Rational reasoning can only help you find how to achieve goals that align with your values. It is strictly worthless in choosing your values.
If a corporation has determined that profit maximization is their core tenet, excluding the needs of a minority of users can likely be deduced in a rational manner from that tenet. That is precisely why values need to be forced onto corporate actors through regulation, e.g. in this case through mandatory accessibility guidelines like EU directive 2019/882 that enters into force this very week.
Rational reasoning also takes into account long-term and second and higher order effects which quarterly profit-driven reasoning often ignores. If you support 95% of users and your competitor supports 100% then that may help your competitor getting 100% of them while you get none.
In my experience, accessibility features are needed by about 1.5% of users (E-commerce and some internal business tools). So by your logic, the rational choice is to exclude accessibility?
Or Linux users? Or even Firefox users in our market?
Something is off in this calculation, how did they get to such a high cost for such a simple thing as an alternative image format when the web supports multiple???
My guess would be that the users hitting different types of issues are mostly the same; someone who can't view an alternative image format is using an obscure old browser or obscure OS that will inevitably have a ton of other issues too, and fixing only a subset of the issues would not make much difference.
No, this was not about the alternative image format. This was about the browsers and screen resolutions that we choose to fully support.
We took the data directly from the website visitors analytics.
Basically .. resolutions under 1024px and anything older than edge 11 was left out of the scope.
Thanks for demonstrating why laws like ADA are needed to force companies to not be bad citizens. We desperately need similar laws to force compatibility with older hardware - one could even champion it under environmental protection.
> 5% of people can't view them, yet 25% of top websites use them?
That's not how it works.
The server declares what versions of media it has, and
the client requests a supported media format. The same trick have been used for audio and video for ages too.
This problem was solved by HTTP since forever. Client sends `Accept` header with supported formats and server selects the necessary content with corresponding `Content-Type` header. You don't need any HTML tags for it.
Images are often at different resolutions too, that way, depending on the pixel density of the device, and the physical size, the browser can select the photo that has high enough resolution, but not one that is needlessly large, while also selecting the preferred image format.
File extensions are just a hint about what the file might be and have nothing to do with what the file actually is. If the server sets the MIME type, the browser will use that as the hint.
But even beyond that, most file formats have a bit of a header at the start of the file that declares the actual format of the file. Browsers already can understand that and use the correct render for a file without an extension.
I agree with the point you're trying to make, but your examples are terrible. Music industry doesn't have too much to do to help deaf people. It's not like they're deliberately making deaf-inaccessible music instead of relying on the old good deaf-accessible music formats.
(Also, the parent comment's example is also not so good because as someone else pointed just because the top 25% websites are serving webp it does mean they're not serving alternative formats for those who does not support it, as this is quite trivial to setup)
I don't really think this is the case here. All major browsers already support the new spec for example. This isn't a case of oh we'll have support for it eventually, it's already there.
> Momentum built, and additional parties became interested. […] we had representation from […] Adobe, Apple, BBC, Comcast / NBCUniversal, Google, MovieLabs, and […] W3C
> Many […] programs […] already support the new PNG spec: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, iOS/macOS, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer...
> Plus, you saw some broadcast companies in that list above. Behind the scenes, hardware and tooling are being updated to support the new PNG spec.
There's a big issue that all old popular image formats are 8-bits. 10-bits or even 12-bits would help a lot with storing more information and maintaining editability.
If adding more bits to an image format, please make it 'n bit'. Ie. the file could be 8 bit, it could be 10, it could be 12, it could be 60 bit!
Whilst we're at it, please get rid of RGB and make it N channels too.
Libraries can choose to render that into a 3 channel, 8 bit buffer for legacy applications - but the data will be there for CMYK or HDR, or depth maps, or transparency, or focus stacking, or any other future feature!
There are some applications for a new image format, but I agree that what we have is generally good enough.
We need good video formats however. Video makes up most of the global internet traffic, probably accounts for a good part of global storage capacity too. Even slightly better compression will have a massive impact.
I miss the days of old Amiga OS 3.x, where you had installable "DataTypes" that any program could make use of. If we had that, then all such programs could at least be updated to basic compatibility by simply updating the datatype.
It is very backwards compatible. I'm not sure why you thought that.
We jumped through quite a lot of hoops to make sure old software will be able to display new images. They simply won't display them optimally. But for the most part, that would be because the old software wouldn't display images optimally anyway. So the limit was the software, not the format.
What I mean by this is old software that treats everything as sRGB wouldn't correctly show a Display P3 image anyway. But we made sure it will still display the image as correctly as it could.
The sample HDR images don't show correctly in image viewers even though the colors used fit into the sRGB gamut (or at least have good approximations in there). That's not really backwards compatibility.
The problem is when "HDR" images that would perfectly fit into the sRGB color space are not rendered correctly on non-HDR systems. This PNGv2 fails that which means it isn't really any more useful and one of the existing (and much better) HDR-supporting formats like JPEG-XL or the video codec based ones pushed by the big guys.
Someone who is aware of this issue can do that. Someone who just uses the standard export might not notice that their files are not backwards compatible. It might also be that most of the image fits into sRGB but a few highlights do not - having the whole image washed out because of those is also not good.
"Lossless WebP is typically 26% smaller than PNG, while lossy WebP can be 25-34% smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality levels"
This literally saves houndred of thousand of cost, bandwith, electricity every month on the internet. In fact, I strongly belive that this is one of the greatest contributions from Google to society just like ZSTD from Facebook.
"WebP is used by 16.7% of all websites. This means that while it's a popular image format, it's not yet the dominant format, with JPEG still holding the majority share at 73.0%, according to W3Techs. However, WebP offers significant advantages in terms of compression and file size, making it a preferred choice for many web developers. "
Image and video compression comparisons are like statistics with the right corpus and evaluation criteria you can should whatever narrative you want to push.
Society doesn't need a new image format. I'd wager to say not any new multimedia format. Big corporate entites do, and have churning them out at a steady pace.
Look at poor webp - a format pushed by the largest industry players - and the abysmal everyday use it gets, and the hate it generates.