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This is incredible! If the claimed benefits are true (and the WebX team seems to be pretty honest about their numbers) this is now a better format than PNG, JP

This is incredible! If the claimed benefits are true (and the WebX team seems to be pretty honest about their numbers) this is now a better format than PNG, JPEG, and GIF, all at once, as well as covering some other options (lossy + transparent) that could be interesting. WebP, with recent metadata and ICC support, and these new additions, is starting to look like a serious image format that we might have good reason. If Google can encourage Firefox to start supporting it, it might even see significant usage. Just think --- one image format covering all the use cases you care about, one optimization tool, one backend to thumbnail user images, you name it. Man, PNG was such a nice binary format, though. sniff

gcp 15y ago
1) Quoting source page: "The bit stream specification has not been finalized". This is something other implementers want to stay clear from for now, let alone it gets deployed in the wild and you have massive compatibility issues, or need to bloat all supporting software to support now-long outdated bitstreams (hi Vorbis!). 2) "If Google can encourage Firefox to start supporting it". Yeah, like they did with WebM, and then completely backstabbing Firefox by never actually removing H.264 support from Chrome, despite claiming to going to do it for many months. If the Firefox developers don't have total amnesia, I think they're going to need a lot of encouragement.
- ZeroGravitas 15y ago
  point 2 is just a little overdramatic considering all the other support that Google offers for WebM e.g. buying it for $130 million in the first place, supporting it in Chrome and Android, converting the entire Youtube back catalog, producing reference hardware encoders and decoders and giving the designs away for free, etc. etc. Chrome and Firefox in desktop and Opera and Android in mobile have enough combined share to shift the market on this if they want to. I'd hope and assume that Mozilla's decision making would be a bit more related to their mission to support an open web than to petty recriminations for percieved slights.
  - gcp 15y ago
    Chrome and Firefox in desktop and Opera and Android in mobile have enough combined share to shift the market on this if they want to. Yes, meaning dropping support for H.264. Firefox did this, Chrome did not (I'm not sure what Opera does?). What's the conclusion? Google doesn't particularly care to shift the market in favor of their own format, or thinks it will burn its other fingers too much in doing so. Meanwhile, H.264 is used everywhere, including for Firefox users, who get to enjoy it over the now-deprecated Flash. Do you see a problem looming here for "supporting the open web"? I'd hope and assume that Mozilla's decision making would be a bit more related to their mission to support an open web than to petty recriminations for percieved slights. Does WebP advance an open web? Let's see, is there some actual standard describing it, or do you have to blindly lump in a big chunk of Google code to support it? (That's a real question)
    - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
      I actually meant WebP when I said they could move the market on their own. I think that WebM has a slightly harder hill to climb and would require Microsoft, Apple or Adobe to get fully on board, but that WebP adoption would also help ever so slightly in that regard too. (Opera, who originally proposed the video tag, with a suggestion to use Theora as the only viable video format at the time with licensing compatible with the web, didn't drop H.264 because they never supported it. I mentioned them in this context because they already support and use WebP in their bandwidth-saving page-transcoding features which are particularly useful in mobile devices on 3G networks. This solves the chicken and egg problem and gives browsers, like e.g. Amazon's Silk, a reason to support WebP even if no-one uses it yet.) edit: and to answer your last question, WebP was up until recently a subset of WebM, which can be decoded by at least two other independent implementations I know of (FFMPEG and one in Java). Standards settings bodies have been corrupted by politics and are no match for multiple, independently produced, open source codebases.
    - justinschuh 15y ago
      You're implying a controversy here that simply does not exist. Firefox never had support for h.264 to drop in the first place, because the licensing model is (justifiably) unacceptable to Mozilla. And Google is still entirely committed to WebM. It's just that dropping dropping h.264 from Chrome requires quite a bit of coordination to ensure that the vast majority of content remains accessible--particularly with regards to Google properties.

gcp 15y ago

1) Quoting source page: "The bit stream specification has not been finalized". This is something other implementers want to stay clear from for now, let alone it gets deployed in the wild and you have massive compatibility issues, or need to bloat all supporting software to support now-long outdated bitstreams (hi Vorbis!). 2) "If Google can encourage Firefox to start supporting it". Yeah, like they did with WebM, and then completely backstabbing Firefox by never actually removing H.264 support from Chrome, despite claiming to going to do it for many months. If the Firefox developers don't have total amnesia, I think they're going to need a lot of encouragement.

ZeroGravitas 15y ago
point 2 is just a little overdramatic considering all the other support that Google offers for WebM e.g. buying it for $130 million in the first place, supporting it in Chrome and Android, converting the entire Youtube back catalog, producing reference hardware encoders and decoders and giving the designs away for free, etc. etc. Chrome and Firefox in desktop and Opera and Android in mobile have enough combined share to shift the market on this if they want to. I'd hope and assume that Mozilla's decision making would be a bit more related to their mission to support an open web than to petty recriminations for percieved slights.
- gcp 15y ago
  Chrome and Firefox in desktop and Opera and Android in mobile have enough combined share to shift the market on this if they want to. Yes, meaning dropping support for H.264. Firefox did this, Chrome did not (I'm not sure what Opera does?). What's the conclusion? Google doesn't particularly care to shift the market in favor of their own format, or thinks it will burn its other fingers too much in doing so. Meanwhile, H.264 is used everywhere, including for Firefox users, who get to enjoy it over the now-deprecated Flash. Do you see a problem looming here for "supporting the open web"? I'd hope and assume that Mozilla's decision making would be a bit more related to their mission to support an open web than to petty recriminations for percieved slights. Does WebP advance an open web? Let's see, is there some actual standard describing it, or do you have to blindly lump in a big chunk of Google code to support it? (That's a real question)
  - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
    I actually meant WebP when I said they could move the market on their own. I think that WebM has a slightly harder hill to climb and would require Microsoft, Apple or Adobe to get fully on board, but that WebP adoption would also help ever so slightly in that regard too. (Opera, who originally proposed the video tag, with a suggestion to use Theora as the only viable video format at the time with licensing compatible with the web, didn't drop H.264 because they never supported it. I mentioned them in this context because they already support and use WebP in their bandwidth-saving page-transcoding features which are particularly useful in mobile devices on 3G networks. This solves the chicken and egg problem and gives browsers, like e.g. Amazon's Silk, a reason to support WebP even if no-one uses it yet.) edit: and to answer your last question, WebP was up until recently a subset of WebM, which can be decoded by at least two other independent implementations I know of (FFMPEG and one in Java). Standards settings bodies have been corrupted by politics and are no match for multiple, independently produced, open source codebases.
  - justinschuh 15y ago
    You're implying a controversy here that simply does not exist. Firefox never had support for h.264 to drop in the first place, because the licensing model is (justifiably) unacceptable to Mozilla. And Google is still entirely committed to WebM. It's just that dropping dropping h.264 from Chrome requires quite a bit of coordination to ensure that the vast majority of content remains accessible--particularly with regards to Google properties.