Have you ever noticed how good Google is at creating change? It almost seems like anything they want to happen does, even if it doesn’t make much sense for anyone except Google.
Google thinks we need to stop using JPG images. And the change makes lots of sense for Google, will speed up the Internet, and . . . will be very little fun in a bunch of other ways.
Any time you make a business change, pain is involved. Google wants us to stop using the graphics format we’ve all come to understand because they’ve developed a new format that’s a bunch smaller. This means that web pages will load faster. Seriously, if the change is ever made “complete”, we’ll all win.
There’s an old joke that goes like this:
- How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a blown light bulb?
- None. When a lightbulb blows out, Bill Gates just declares “darkness” to be the new standard.
Google, in trying to make JPG go away, is declaring a new standard in a way that only Google would dare (and that only Google would have a real chance of making happen). The problem, though, is that JPG has become such a standard that it’s everywhere. Your digital camera outputting JPG files is the best example of this, and outside the world of Internet development I can say with some certainty that conversations about “converting graphics formats” makes people’s eyes roll back in their heads.
Oh, and by the way, while Google has already made tools to convert JPG files to the new WebP format available, the tools are geek-only, and the files won’t yet work anywhere, including on the Internet.
That’s right; because your browser doesn’t know what a WebP file is, it can’t display the files.
Google has also introduced WebM, a new video format designed to work with the latest browsers and starting to be implemented by those browsers. But a similar issue is going to crop up; you’d need to convert your .MOV and .AVI files to WebM to use its advanced features.
Reel-to-reel players became cassettes and 8-track tapes, and both then and when those gave way to CDs, people mostly just started over, but in doing so they gained something; first portability, then durability. When it’s time to convert your JPGs to WebP, a much larger number of people will have problems they don’t know how to solve. When that happens, please be very careful about how you proceed.
