4 ms·

It is sad that Mozilla wont implement WebP format in addition to GIF/APNG due to political reasons (I see no valid technical reasons to not include this code, e

• Scaevolus 12y ago
  It's especially amusing since Firefox supports WebM, which is VP8 video in a Matroska container. WebP is a VP8 frame in a simple container.
  • TD-Linux 12y ago
    WebP is not just a VP8 frame. It now has its own separate library to implement decoding, and its animation features are far different from VP8.
• thristian 12y ago
  Did you not read the section in the linked article about how WebP is not measurably better than JPEG?
  • xvilka 12y ago
    I've read it. Yep, looks like they can be compared for the static images. But what about animation? And there are plenty of websites using webp already. It is not like JPEG or WebP - why not just support them both!? (or APNG and WebP).
    • kevingadd 12y ago
      I imagine there's some amount of frustration on the part of people being told they should spend time implementing WebP, when APNG was a real working alternative circa ~2004 and nobody else was willing to implement it. (Admittedly, WebP does things APNG isn't capable of.) Reminds me of MNG, where we had an animation format with support for alpha and either PNG or JPEG style compression of frames, but it never got a pervasive browser implementation so it died. (I get the impression there were strong technical reasons for that, of course.) Coincidentally, MNG also indirectly solved this problem. JNG was a subset-format of MNG that provided JPEG-compressed static images with optional support for alpha, so implementing MNG implied implementing JNG. But we never got it on the web. At the very least, instead of just saying 'WebP is bad', they're putting their money where their mouth is and advancing the state-of-the-art in JPEG encoding so that people won't need WebP (other than the alpha channel use case, that is.)
    • thristian 12y ago
      What's the advantage of animated WebP over WebM? Are there many websites using WebP that aren't Google properties? I'll be interested to see if a VP9- or Daala-based version of WebP is more compelling.
    • maxst 12y ago
      >But what about animation? Try gif2webp and gif2apng converters on this example, and you will know: https://www.google.com/logos/doodles/2014/world-cup-2014-54-6495277649231872-hp.gif https://www.google.com/logos/doodles/2014/world-cup-2014-54-...
  • izacus 12y ago
    So... having to serve huge 5x larger PNGs due to transparency is not measurably better? Also our empiric measurments have shown, that WebP degrades more gracefully as you lower quality (compression artifacts aren't as visible) which allowed us to save about 30% of bandwith total by serving WebP to Androids and Chrome clients.
• gsnedders 12y ago
  We (as in browser vendors as a whole, which although I'm no longer directly part of I'm still around enough!) don't want to add stuff to browsers just because it's technically sound to include. People propose plenty of things with technically sound code, but there's far more to developing a platform than including everything that's technically sound. You have to make decisions as to what you wish to include. Once a something becomes near universal (in terms of marketshare, not in terms number of browsers; see IE's peak for the clear examples there!) it becomes treated as a baseline; once it's there it's incredibly hard to remove. Every time something else gets added that's more code to maintain, more code to ensure correctness (and security!) thereof, and a higher barrier of entry to the browser market. As a result, the default answer to adding anything should be "no".
  • anon1385 12y ago
    This just goes to show how broken the browser model is as an app platform. The fact you (browser vendors) have to decide which image formats to support should be a huge red flag demonstrating that something is fundamentally wrong with your platform. Many things of interest developers might want to do currently require co-operation from the browser vendors, and their default position is 'no' unless it is in their commercial interest. Also, any one of the browser vendor vetoing the proposal is enough to kill it. Apple/Google/Microsoft are all huge companies with many products, so it's quite likely that you are a direct competitor to at least one product from one of the browser vendors, giving them extra incentive to veto most of the time. Until the web is a platform where the vendors don't have the power to veto basic functionality like decoding an image it will remain the plaything of the browser vendors, used to bludgeon their competition.
• swift 12y ago
  I wouldn't take the fact that a bug has been filed about removing APNG as evidence that it's going to happen. It definitely won't in the near future.