stop pages from serving webp

[Jon L]

So, I found this group in my search on how to completely prevent chrome or any browser from automatically forcing an image to be saved as webp (even when the web page is serving a normal uncompressed image as a jpg) or how to completely stop webp from being even accepted by any browser I use.  I can see how this format and compression might make sense in a location that is operating with a slow or poor network connection with bad bandwidth options.  However, for those of us not having to deal with that and rather have stupid fast network speeds and bandwidth is a non-issue, forcing the webp format is not only un-necessary, it is kind of pointless.  There is no reason to not serve an image (or any media for that matter) at normal uncompressed format.  What does it save, a few kilobytes of bandwidth?  That makes absolutely no difference for how quickly a web page displays content.  There is no reason not to display content uncompressed and at full quality when the network is fully capable of doing so.  Webp should only be used as an option when there is a demonstrated impact to the ability of a web server to supply content to an end user.  When the latency is in the single digits of milliseconds there is no legitimate or valid reason to use webp anywhere.   So, as an end user who finds this technology not only pointless but honestly annoying because it is causing things that should be high quality and be uncompressed to be forced to a lower quality when there is absolutely zero reason to, how do I as the end user completely and utterly block webp from even being an valid option to be served with any browser I use?  Is there a setting in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc, that can be turned on, enabled, toggled, checked, or vis versa that will prevent webp from even being a valid option?  I assume that there must be as the internet has worked for literal decades without webp even being an option and people have been able to happily and easily surf the web and view uncompressed and high quality content as opposed to forced low quality compressed content.  I would appreciate answers on how to actually block webp, not articles or manifesto's on why you personally believe webp to be the savior of the world and/or internet.  Just cutting that off now before someone gets "internet offended" by a legitimate question.  I am not concerned with your reasons as to why you spend your time working on a image compression protocol, what you do with your time is your business.  I would only like to know how one who has no real or legitimate use for this actually not use it, instead of finding themselves being forced to make use of a protocol that serves no purpose other than to make things quite literally worse than they need to be.

[Yannis Guyon]

Do you have an example of a webpage exhibiting a lower visual quality when using WebP compared to other formats?

I am surprised by your mention of a "normal uncompressed image as a jpg". JPEG is a compressed format, and almost always brings data loss, in a way that is designed to be visually fine to human eyes. That is why JPEG is commonly called a "lossy" image format.

Compressed "lossless" image formats exist, such as PNG. They do not incur any data loss compared to the original image. Uncompressed image formats exist too, such as variants of RAW, BMP etc. but they are uncommon past the image acquisition step because of their huge size in bytes.

WebP is a compressed image format, and can be used both as lossy and lossless, to improve the compression rate (smaller file sizes) over JPEG and PNG, respectively. The reduction in bytes compared to the images commonly found on the web in JPEG and PNG is in the order of magnitude of tens of percents.

So you can either have a smaller WebP image with the same visual quality as a JPEG, or a WebP image with the same size as the JPEG but that looks better (meaning it has fewer compression artifacts). That is only true if the original image was used to compress both the JPEG and the WebP images. If you just take the compressed, lossy JPEG as input to the WebP encoder, you may end up with subpar results. It is the duty of CMS and website providers to correctly generate and serve their images.

According to the Web Almanac [1], "the median website’s total weight [...] was 2,019 kilobytes (on mobile), and 881 of those kilobytes were images". If WebP is 25% smaller than older formats, one can estimate that it can reduce the median website by 10%, for the same visual quality.

That said, I understand your concern of having a format that may not be supported by the tools you are using to manipulate JPEG images. As of today, WebP has a significant presence in the web image landscape, and most solutions and projects relying on image reading accept WebP as input, or should be in the near future.

I am curious about the WebP-related roadblocks you are encountering in your workflow, could you provide more details on that?

[1] https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2022/media#images

[Maryla]

As Yannis pointed out, disabling webp will not give you "normal uncompressed images". Most likely, you will end up with a compressed jpg. Which of the webp file or jpeg file has better visual quality will depend on how the website owner did the webp conversion. If it was done properly, the webp file should look about the same or better. In some cases, it might look worse if the compression settings were too aggressive or if the webp file was recompressed from the lossy jpeg file.

That being said, there are some ways to partially disable webp. In Chrome, you can install an extension that allows you to modify http request headers, then change the "accept" header to remove image/webp, and optionally change the "user-agent" header (for websites that do user agent sniffing) to make it look like your browser doesn't support webp. See details here for example https://superuser.com/a/1603336

However, this will only work on some websites. Websites that unconditionally serve webp will be unaffected, and also websites where the choice of image format is done on the client side using the srcset html attribute. Changing the headers might also have some undesirable side effects, in particular changing the user-agent.

If the issue is saving images, you can also install a Chrome extension that allows saving images in other formats, for example https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-image-as-png/nkokmeaibnajheohncaamjggkanfbphi or  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-image-as-type/gabfmnliflodkdafenbcpjdlppllnemd

[James Zern]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 4:49 AM 'Maryla' via WebP Discussion <webp-d...@webmproject.org> wrote:

As Yannis pointed out, disabling webp will not give you "normal uncompressed images". Most likely, you will end up with a compressed jpg. Which of the webp file or jpeg file has better visual quality will depend on how the website owner did the webp conversion. If it was done properly, the webp file should look about the same or better. In some cases, it might look worse if the compression settings were too aggressive or if the webp file was recompressed from the lossy jpeg file.

That being said, there are some ways to partially disable webp. In Chrome, you can install an extension that allows you to modify http request headers, then change the "accept" header to remove image/webp, and optionally change the "user-agent" header (for websites that do user agent sniffing) to make it look like your browser doesn't support webp. See details here for example https://superuser.com/a/1603336

However, this will only work on some websites. Websites that unconditionally serve webp will be unaffected, and also websites where the choice of image format is done on the client side using the srcset html attribute. Changing the headers might also have some undesirable side effects, in particular changing the user-agent.

If the issue is saving images, you can also install a Chrome extension that allows saving images in other formats, for example https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-image-as-png/nkokmeaibnajheohncaamjggkanfbphi or  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-image-as-type/gabfmnliflodkdafenbcpjdlppllnemd

There is also a feature request in Chrome for a native solution: https://crbug.com/246950. I don't know about other browsers.

 

On Monday, January 16, 2023 at 1:07:26 PM UTC+1 Yannis Guyon wrote:

Do you have an example of a webpage exhibiting a lower visual quality when using WebP compared to other formats?

I am surprised by your mention of a "normal uncompressed image as a jpg". JPEG is a compressed format, and almost always brings data loss, in a way that is designed to be visually fine to human eyes. That is why JPEG is commonly called a "lossy" image format.

Compressed "lossless" image formats exist, such as PNG. They do not incur any data loss compared to the original image. Uncompressed image formats exist too, such as variants of RAW, BMP etc. but they are uncommon past the image acquisition step because of their huge size in bytes.

WebP is a compressed image format, and can be used both as lossy and lossless, to improve the compression rate (smaller file sizes) over JPEG and PNG, respectively. The reduction in bytes compared to the images commonly found on the web in JPEG and PNG is in the order of magnitude of tens of percents.

So you can either have a smaller WebP image with the same visual quality as a JPEG, or a WebP image with the same size as the JPEG but that looks better (meaning it has fewer compression artifacts). That is only true if the original image was used to compress both the JPEG and the WebP images. If you just take the compressed, lossy JPEG as input to the WebP encoder, you may end up with subpar results. It is the duty of CMS and website providers to correctly generate and serve their images.

According to the Web Almanac [1], "the median website’s total weight [...] was 2,019 kilobytes (on mobile), and 881 of those kilobytes were images". If WebP is 25% smaller than older formats, one can estimate that it can reduce the median website by 10%, for the same visual quality.

That said, I understand your concern of having a format that may not be supported by the tools you are using to manipulate JPEG images. As of today, WebP has a significant presence in the web image landscape, and most solutions and projects relying on image reading accept WebP as input, or should be in the near future.

I am curious about the WebP-related roadblocks you are encountering in your workflow, could you provide more details on that?

[1] https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2022/media#images

On Monday, January 16, 2023 at 6:24:15 AM UTC+1 Jon L wrote:

So, I found this group in my search on how to completely prevent chrome or any browser from automatically forcing an image to be saved as webp (even when the web page is serving a normal uncompressed image as a jpg) or how to completely stop webp from being even accepted by any browser I use.  I can see how this format and compression might make sense in a location that is operating with a slow or poor network connection with bad bandwidth options.  However, for those of us not having to deal with that and rather have stupid fast network speeds and bandwidth is a non-issue, forcing the webp format is not only un-necessary, it is kind of pointless.  There is no reason to not serve an image (or any media for that matter) at normal uncompressed format.  What does it save, a few kilobytes of bandwidth?  That makes absolutely no difference for how quickly a web page displays content.  There is no reason not to display content uncompressed and at full quality when the network is fully capable of doing so.  Webp should only be used as an option when there is a demonstrated impact to the ability of a web server to supply content to an end user.  When the latency is in the single digits of milliseconds there is no legitimate or valid reason to use webp anywhere.   So, as an end user who finds this technology not only pointless but honestly annoying because it is causing things that should be high quality and be uncompressed to be forced to a lower quality when there is absolutely zero reason to, how do I as the end user completely and utterly block webp from even being an valid option to be served with any browser I use?

One thing to consider here is the cost of bandwidth for the site serving the page.

 

  Is there a setting in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc, that can be turned on, enabled, toggled, checked, or vis versa that will prevent webp from even being a valid option?  I assume that there must be as the internet has worked for literal decades without webp even being an option and people have been able to happily and easily surf the web and view uncompressed and high quality content as opposed to forced low quality compressed content.  I would appreciate answers on how to actually block webp, not articles or manifesto's on why you personally believe webp to be the savior of the world and/or internet.  Just cutting that off now before someone gets "internet offended" by a legitimate question.  I am not concerned with your reasons as to why you spend your time working on a image compression protocol, what you do with your time is your business.  I would only like to know how one who has no real or legitimate use for this actually not use it, instead of finding themselves being forced to make use of a protocol that serves no purpose other than to make things quite literally worse than they need to be.

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