Why are steam images turning into non-image content webp?

[Vas]

Half the images on Steam's site are now non-image content, webp. If you try to view them, the browser thinks it needs to download it.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/370233273408028673/537880147043418123/unknown.png

This suddenly happened over night.

[Vas]

I'm guessing Valve decided to disable their website for firefox users by switching to a format Firefox doesn't support. In which case I will continue to keep this topic near the top and file bug reports till it gets fixed, I am highly annoyed about this. I'll wait before I file a report just in case someone at Valve sees this and fixes it before hand.

[macluk]

Same here. Other browsers seem not that great as firefox... so maybe we all should ditch steam ;)

[Tharon]

Google trying to impose their non standard elements. Valve comply.

Not the first time it happens. Valve is still denying the use of the voice chat on Vivaldi, because apparently Valve wants users to use Chrome.

The chat of course works well with Vivaldi (it's a chromium based browser), it's just prohibited by Valve developers.

[Tharon]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Vas:

I'm guessing Valve decided to disable their website for firefox users by switching to a format Firefox doesn't support. In which case I will continue to keep this topic near the top and file bug reports till it gets fixed, I am highly annoyed about this. I'll wait before I file a report just in case someone at Valve sees this and fixes it before hand.

Anyway, the upcoming version of Firefox (65) will supporto webp. But is still not a bright idea to use a non standard format.

[Vas]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Tharon:

Google trying to impose their non standard elements. Valve comply.

The chat of course works well with Vivaldi (it's a chromium based browser), it's just prohibited by Valve developers.

Well, Valve likes money. They don't do anything now if it doesn't make them money. Google probably pays them enormous amounts of money to push their product out there. So they must abide and ban things Google tells them to. They don't put any effort into making their client useful and decent. File tickets to complain about their client being unable to retain any sort of memory and they blame you and close the ticket. Meh.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Tharon:

Anyway, the upcoming version of Firefox (65) will supporto webp. But is still not a bright idea to use a non standard format.

How soon is that? Because I can't load ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the new steam website crap. They think this new ♥♥♥♥♥♥ format will help? They need to stop developers from putting 100-400 MB of gifs all over their store pages, thats what'll save us bandwidth.

[aiusepsi]

To prefix what I'm about to write, bear in mind I also use a web browser (Safari) which doesn't support WebP.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Vas:

I'm guessing Valve decided to disable their website for firefox users by switching to a format Firefox doesn't support.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Vas:

Well, Valve likes money. They don't do anything now if it doesn't make them money. Google probably pays them enormous amounts of money to push their product out there. So they must abide and ban things Google tells them to.

This is a slightly daft series of conspiracy theories. There are perfectly reasonable explanations which don't involve secret payments and nefarious transactions. As to why anyone would adopt WebP; you can get images which have a smaller size than the equivalent PNG. This isn't that surprising, PNG is about 20 years old, and the state-of-the-art in compression has moved on. It's apparently a 26% saving in space over PNG, and that's considerable if you serve a lot of images.

It could just be a simple CDN misconfiguration which is causing WebP to be served to incompatible browsers. If you pull the full URL for an image on the Workshop, it looks something like this:

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/940590971992099470/B145A778FB679B565EA5DE4CE82C05BC8D8653C0/?imw=637&imh=358&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=true

And that seems to be serving WebP images. If you strip off the extra params from the end and load that:

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/940590971992099470/B145A778FB679B565EA5DE4CE82C05BC8D8653C0/

It serves a PNG. So some code is just programmatically inappropriately serving WebP in some contexts.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Tharon:

Google trying to impose their non standard elements. Valve comply.

Not the first time it happens. Valve is still denying the use of the voice chat on Vivaldi, because apparently Valve wants users to use Chrome.

The chat of course works well with Vivaldi (it's a chromium based browser), it's just prohibited by Valve developers.

I think in this case it's just more likely they just forgot about other Chromium-based browsers. The detection for Chrome they're using is simple as all heck; they're just parsing the user-agent string with this JS library: https://github.com/faisalman/ua-parser-js calling getBrowser(), and checking that the result is "Chrome". If you spoof the user-agent to remove the "Vivaldi" bit, it should detect as Chrome and work.

[Sysgen]

Wake me up when I can see all the images in my inventory with Valve's own client.

[ReBoot]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Sysgen:

Wake me up when I can see all the images in my inventory with Valve's own client.

Dunno about you, I can. See if deleting Steam's web cache helps.

[Sysgen]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย ReBoot:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Sysgen:

Wake me up when I can see all the images in my inventory with Valve's own client.

Dunno about you, I can. See if deleting Steam's web cache helps.

I have too many items. Not an isolated problem. They haven't been displaying correctly for years.

[ReBoot]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Sysgen:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย ReBoot:

Dunno about you, I can. See if deleting Steam's web cache helps.

I have too many items. Not an isolated problem. They haven't been displaying correctly for years.

Cache issues would, if anything, rather likely hit all items to display at once.

[Vas]

Valve's client is pretty bad. Literally every day it has to log in and my laptop has been running for over 80 days now. Its gotten stuck sometimes on the infinite login screen so I default to firefox cause it knows how to manage cookies and cache properly. :P

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย aiusepsi:

This is a slightly daft series of conspiracy theories. There are perfectly reasonable explanations which don't involve secret payments and nefarious transactions. As to why anyone would adopt WebP; you can get images which have a smaller size than the equivalent PNG. This isn't that surprising, PNG is about 20 years old, and the state-of-the-art in compression has moved on. It's apparently a 26% saving in space over PNG, and that's considerable if you serve a lot of images.

It could just be a simple CDN misconfiguration which is causing WebP to be served to incompatible browsers.

Yes, they are somewhat smaller, but most images seem to be jpgs anyway on steam at 90% quality which is just fine and we know all browsers support it. They waste space supporting multiple formats because they have to store these multiple formats and waste processing power detecting which format to send to users.

The biggest usage of bandwidth is gifs which is popular now and has 100MB or more. I doubt WebP will replace Gifs. aPNG never took off and its far better. No one likes moving to a new format. Old formats shouldn't be abandoned just cause they are old, its still fine. But whatever. A lot these days new crap gets forced on people without warning or consent and thats why people get angry easily.

[Vas]

Speaking of bandwidth saving, now we've got these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gifs in our NEWS. (when you launch steam that news popup that advertises games)

[Tharon]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Vas:

Speaking of bandwidth saving, now we've got these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gifs in our NEWS. (when you launch steam that news popup that advertises games)

You can disable those.

[Vas]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Tharon:

You can disable those.

What, the news or the gifs?
The news, I kinda like.
The gifs, no you can't really disable that. Its devs using gifs instead of images for their games because apparently static images just can't showcase a game good enough anymore.

This webp stuff certainly isn't going to help with that portion of the data usage issues here if all devs are sticking 100MB of gifs on their pages and now even in the news popups.

[babai]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย aiusepsi:

It serves a PNG. So some code is just programmatically inappropriately serving WebP in some contexts.

trying to understand: could such context be firefox pre 57 (legacy extensions, as firefox becomes another chrome skin). Since my firefox can rendre png, how do i get the attention of those who write the inappropriate code to fix to png for non chrome (chromium) based browsers? who do we need to contact. make aware.

thanks for your explanantion by the way.
d.