Waterfall Staff

Regarding Images

As some of you have noticed, older browsers can't display WebP images, and you get a warning about it. This decision was made based on two factors:

1) WebP has been a standard for a while now

2) The cost of storage

Storing two image formats gets expensive, real fast - especially when older image formats, like PNG, are up to 15x the size of the WebP image.

Technical data from CanIUse said that the number of people who wouldn't be able to see images would be negligible - however, it turns out this isn't the case! Firefox and Chrome are listed as supported for a long time, but apparently on iOS, they rely on Apple to provide the libraries, which they apparently didn't until iOS 14. This means the math was WAY off.

So, this is a heads up - without a downtime I'll be reconverting all the images, this time including a PNG version. This does mean the site gets a bit costlier to run, but a LOT more people can't use it than I anticipated, so I'm hoping it's worth it. This'll take a couple of days, so the warning will stay in the header in the meantime, but I wanted to let you know.

In addition, this will also solve the compression issue with stuff that was converted - a library I used had some internal changes that I didn't catch so the quality setting didn't work anymore. This is now fixed, and has been pushed to live, so images uploaded going forward should work fine too.

Update! The transcode server has been updated to create both modern and legacy formats of any new images uploaded. I'll be working on the stuff to get existing stuff re-converted as soon as possible, but people should start seeing stuff again soon.