[X] My Assistant

don't download the resizes ezpz

But this does not affect the actual data being uploaded, only the thumbnails and resized pictures.
And the difference is marginal, if you zoom in and squint hard enough, you might notice an improvement, but that's only for the resized pictures anyway.
Not worth the hassle in my opinion.

Who knows, maybe someday the originals will get losslessly reencoded to be webp too lol. A lot of the originals on this website are extremely bloated.

When talking about originals, there's a lot of images encoded in jpeg that should've been encoded in png, a lot of images encoded in jpeg that could be losslessly optimized, and when talking about png there's very few instances I've seen where a losslessly optimized png is smaller than a lossless webp.

Just a random guess from the stuff I've downloaded over the years, and I'm guessing if they losslessly optimized everything and losslessly reencoded most pngs into webp, they'd probably lower the storage usage of the site by like 20-40%.

Between storage usage, bandwidth usage, and CPU usage, I have no idea which are the bigger problems however.

Count me among those very unhappy with this change too. Please don't break stuff that worked for years just to update to "the latest and greatest" which is apparently marginal anyway (as evidenced by needing to have a discussion around maybe seeing pixels at 7000% zoom).

don't download the resizes ezpz

I never do, but originals in webps are now allowed too. That's the real travesty.

If the site survived ten years ago with slightly larger image formats that every computer, tablet, phone etc. in the universe manufactured after 1990 could open, was it really necessary to impelent some restrictive soydev format to save 10-20% of file transfer size in 2024?

I really do find this kind of stuff wild.

Like, sure, new stuff causing backwards compatibility problems is a tale as old as time. And there's always a discussion to have about if the pros of the new features and efficiencies are worth the cons of support headaches and compatibility. I get that, I really do. (Most of our userbase at work involves old lab PCs running W7, XP, or even 2000 - and older still users. Tech-illiterate users who can't solve their own problems, who just email three levels of management and say "can't do work, software broken", because reading error messages or documentation is for chumps. Users who have highly-specialized knowledge and cannot be replaced due to this, so we have to cater. We finally drug one guy, kicking and screaming, off of W98 a few years back; that was cause for celebration. Compatibility is no joke.)

But to categorically reject anything new, just because the old one is "good enough", is just sad. The horse was "good enough" for hundreds of years before Ford. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't look for better ways.

Is JPG to WEBP the same kind of change as horse to car? Nope, not even close. But the principle remains. If the only con you can find is basically just some variation on "it's new", then you're scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel there.

...At any rate, any of these things are tradeoffs; nothing in the real world is black and white. Tenboro runs the site, I assume he has some form of metrics. Browsers report some type/version info when they connect, and in aggregate that gives a pretty good view of the userbase - not the perceived userbase who happens to speak up on the forum, but the full userbase. If the choice was "break 10% of users to save 1% bandwidth/storage", we wouldn't be talking here. But instead it's probably more like "break 0.01% of users to save 10% bandwidth/storage", which... is reasonable. (Most people just let the computer's default browser auto-update and wouldn't even know how to use something 5+ years out of date anyway. They just double-click "the google" button and then go watch videos of funny cats or whatever.)

Does it suck to be part of that broken 0.01% (or whatever it is)? Sure. But that number will never be 100% anyway; someone will always draw the short straw. Today just so happens to be your unlucky day.

But to categorically reject anything new, just because the old one is "good enough", is just sad. The horse was "good enough" for hundreds of years before Ford. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't look for better ways.

Is JPG to WEBP the same kind of change as horse to car? Nope, not even close. But the principle remains. If the only con you can find is basically just some variation on "it's new", then you're scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel there.

That's not really the only con. What purpose do people really want an image file to fulfill?

Ability to display an image on screen?
JPEG ✅
WebP ✅

Near universal compability with any software or hardware made in the past 30 years?
JPEG ✅
WebP ❌

Personally my browser displays WebPs just fine, so I'm less impacted by the change. I still have software that doesn't play as nicely with it. Something as simple and ubiquitous as the default install of the Windows 10 Explorer doesn't display WebP thumbnails unless you configure it somehow or install a third-party software to handle thumbnails. I imagine there's a fair share of users who use older more locked down systems like tablets that don't receive system updates anymore and haven't for a while, and would like to continue using them for reading their manga and doujins. What? You're not buying a new phone every 2 years? Get with the system, bozo.

It's just asking for potential problems where there used to be none.

It all really boils down to; If it ain't broke, why break it?
Everything was working fine, there were no issues, no one was complaining.

That's not really true, when using 40 rows and big thumbnails, sometimes not all thumbnails would load and you had to refresh (i was affected too).
The new thumbnails have fixed this by serving 10 tiles instead of 200 individual thumbnails.

Though I will say, the sheer amount is surprising.

This is basically nothing, there's barely been any complaints compared to something liek the search engine update.

And the difference is marginal, if you zoom in and squint hard enough, you might notice an improvement, but that's only for the resized pictures anyway.
Not worth the hassle in my opinion.

The difference is marginal for 1280x and above (while the served files are up to ~40% smaller ime), but the 800x files served by default to mobile users when using 'Auto' Image Size Settings have been massively improved while keeping the already low file size the same. To a point where you don't have to zoom in to see a difference.

https://forums.e-hentai.org/index.php?s=&am...t&p=6574505

Just a random guess from the stuff I've downloaded over the years, and I'm guessing if they losslessly optimized everything and losslessly reencoded most pngs into webp, they'd probably lower the storage usage of the site by like 20-40%.

I optimize my downloads to lossless JXL, some bloated archives can see optimizations up to something like 80%.
While lossless re-encoding wouldn't be a big deal to me, originals should stay "original", even if they are bloated.
I doubt this is being considered. Automatically converting to grayscale when needed would probably do 90% of the job though.

I imagine there's a fair share of users who use older more locked down systems like tablets that don't receive system updates anymore and haven't for a while, and would like to continue using them for reading their manga and doujins. What? You're not buying a new phone every 2 years? Get with the system, bozo.

Realistically those tablets run Android, so they will support webp if they run Android 4.0 (2011).

This post has been edited by -terry-: Nov 13 2024, 08:14

Realistically those tablets run Android, so they will support webp if they run Android 4.0 (2011).

And I'm pretty sure SSL errors will be a bigger issue than lack of WebP support for those pre-Android 4 devices. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Realistically those tablets run Android, so they will support webp if they run Android 4.0 (2011).

I don't think browser support is all that relevant to the topic of archive downloads. The issue are apps.

To add concrete evidence instead of just complaining with a list of windows manga viewing software I use in terms of webp support:
MangaMeeya ❌
MMCE ❌
CDisplay ❌
Yomikiru ✅*

And also some other image tools when I need to organize/edit/convert my stuff:
Windows (7) Explorer ❌ (not everyone has $ and desire for telemetry, especially outside US)
Windows (7) Photo Viewer ❌
Windows (7) Paint ❌
FastStone Resizer ❌
FooSoft Mangle ❌
A-PDF Image to PDF ❌
JupyterLab ❌
Paint.NET ❌
IrfanView ✅ (requires plugin)

So it's not just my super unusual workflow (c.f. xkcd 1172) but plenty of popular software that doesn't work. And the only one (supporting directly opening zip files) that does work is a buggy mess and slow as molasses (Yomikiru*).
If someone has better recommendations for a good manga viewer I'm happy to learn and change.

And while we're at it, why not use new 7z or xz instead of old old zip for archives? /s

To add concrete evidence instead of just complaining with a list of windows manga viewing software I use in terms of webp support:
MangaMeeya ❌
MMCE ❌
CDisplay ❌

MangaMeeya/MMCE has last been updated in 2006 from what i can tell. CDisplay works perfectly fine with webp (see attachment). so its a library issue on your
end. Check out MComix.

Windows (7) Explorer ❌ (not everyone has $ and desire for telemetry, especially outside US)
Windows (7) Photo Viewer ❌
Windows (7) Paint ❌

Windows 7 has been dead for almost 5 years now? Together with 8/8.1 it has a market share of less than 1% today.
If you really want to use it, you can probably find some way to get webp working.
And if you care so much about telemetry, maybe Linux is what you should be using.

FastStone Resizer ❌
A-PDF Image to PDF ❌

Imagemagick can take care of both of these, you can probably find a GUI frontend. Although i rather use pdfimages/poppler for anything pdf related.

FooSoft Mangle ❌

Use [github.com] https://github.com/ciromattia/kcc/, its not dead like Mangle and much better in general.

JupyterLab ❌

JupyterLab appears to be some datascience software, i am not sure how thats related.

Paint.NET ❌

webp support is included since 4.2.5
[forums.getpaint.net] https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/21773-web...ype-2024-05-14/

This post has been edited by -terry-: Nov 13 2024, 20:49

No kidding, stuff that went EOL or was abandoned ten years ago won't support WebP. We're still not going to keep using JPEG indefinitely at the cost of having a worse experience for the 99% who use software from the last decade.

The guy who wrote CDisplay apparently died in 2003, but the derivative CDisplayEx added WebP support in 2014, FWIW.

Edit: ninja'd

I prefer Faststone Imageviewer over XnView, but Faststone's resizer was always kinda shitty for me. I switched to XnConvert, much faster for conversion, resizing, dpi, color depth, etc etc.

[www.xnview.com] https://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/

Windows 7 has been dead for almost 5 years now? Together with 8/8.1 it has a market share of less than 1% today.

Windows 10 has a fairly large user share and I've never seen WebP thumbnails on Windows 10 without installing external software.

6-month old install, latest official Microsoft ISO:
(IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/ZJQi72o.png)

Personally I got them working by installing Icaros, but I bet I'm in a tiny "superuser" minority for installing third party software to handle thumbnails.

Is Windows 10 now considered obsolete archaic software as well? It hasn't even reached EOL.

Windows 10 has a fairly large user share and I've never seen WebP thumbnails on Windows 10 without installing external software.

Worked for me out of the box without manually installing anything, and as far as I can tell that's generally the case. You may need to install the official [apps.microsoft.com] Webp Image Extensions if it did not install automatically, say if you run a stripped version like Enterprise or the N variants. And if you do, you're probably enough of a "superuser" to figure out how to do that.

And also some other image tools when I need to organize/edit/convert my stuff:
Windows (7) Explorer ❌ (not everyone has $ and desire for telemetry, especially outside US)
Windows (7) Photo Viewer ❌

I just want to remind you that windows 7 has several critical 0 days active in it, and you should move off the OS or be taking very active steps to mitigate them all

Here's just two of them.
[www.picussecurity.com] https://www.picussecurity.com/resource/blog...ipv6-in-windows
[www.tarlogic.com] https://www.tarlogic.com/blog/cve-2024-3007...s-wi-fi-driver/

such a cute page to use as an example

This post has been edited by Cipher-kun: Nov 14 2024, 04:19

Windows (7) Explorer ❌ (not everyone has $ and desire for telemetry, especially outside US)
Windows (7) Photo Viewer ❌

Generally, you should use a modern image viewer that supports those newer formats.
But for those legacy viewer enjoyers, you can install [storage.googleapis.com] the WebP codec to view them on the Windows 7 photo viewer.

It works for explorer thumbnails as well.

And while we're at it, why not use new 7z or xz instead of old old zip for archives? /s

Because images are already compressed and general compression methods are not optimized for them.

So many hating on WebP! Better quality at same file size? That is a win!

I want to let the mod/admin team know they are keeping up with the times and taking advantage of what technology has to offer. I appreciate their dedication to this site!

Good job!

Meanwhile I'm SoL because I use my phone and my preferred gallery doesn't support webp, and I've yet to find one as good with folders/pinned stuff. tHat F-space or whatever app certainly didn't do the trick, poor sorting order and didn't load folders.

Really wish this webp stuff were optional. Original images won't cut it either considering the massive size increase for even a single image.

I understand the problem, I after the change of android version had to look for a replacement quickpic, as I then tired to look for an alternative, in the form of an explorer that immediately shows what images lie in the folder, after more than a dozen attempts found Mixplorer. But further if android normally shows webp images, for me only classic formats are suitable, for I still use fsresizer. Now Irfanview will be added, I'm not a fan of updates either.

JPG
✅ It just works.

PNG
✅ It just works.

WebP
❌ It just works.

Just make the old converters have the same GP price of the original archive lol, that will force people to update/find other programs/app.