Mozilla Rejects WebP Image Format, Google Adds It

icebraining writes with a link to Ars Technica's look at the recent rejection of WebP by Mozilla Developer Joe Drew."Building mainstream support for a new media format is challenging, especially when the advantages are ambiguous. WebM was attractive to some browser vendors because its royalty-free license arguably solved a real-world problem. According to critics, the advantages of WebP are illusory and don't offer sufficient advantages over JPEG to justify adoption of the new format. (...) 'As the WebP image format exists currently, I won't accept a patch for it. If and when that changes, I'll happily re-evaluate my decision!' wrote Mozilla developer Joe Drew in a Bugzilla comment.'" However, as the article explains, Google sees enough value in WebP to add it as a supported image format for Picasa.

Comments

Its not the image format that's the problem

[suso]

New file format's can't cure something that user education requires.

Interesting...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It is somewhat interesting to see an image format brought to the table without something basic like support for EXIF storage of some kind, or some feature(however crudely hacked on) that makes it clearly superior to JPEG(like an Alpha channel).

I can understand that somebody the size of Google probably gets real worked up about how to shove more images through slightly less bandwidth; but that actually seems like kind of a niche concern: For icon/branding/graphic design purposes, much of the heavy lifting is done by lossless(for clean, non-crunchy look); but small because of limited color palettes, broad areas of flat color, etc. images. That's mostly GIF and PNG, with some Flash and SVG.

For everyone from people who barely care to people who care how it will look as an 8*10 or a desktop background, you have JPEGs of various sizes and compression levels. On the low end, people will put up with some seriously grain-tastic shit, so long as it loads fast. Anybody who is too good for JPEG entirely is probably either slamming around some fancy print-ready flavor of TIFF, or storing whatever flavor of RAW their preferred camera back spits out.

I'm just not seeing the under-served niche here.

Re:Interesting...

[steelfood]

Trying to unseat JPEG is akin to the various attempts at unseating MP3. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen. There's just too much support for JPEG out there. Nobody's going to support a second file format just because; they rather spend the development time enhancing their product in more meaningful ways.

Even Apple had to cave when it came to MP3 (they wouldn't sell it, but the iPod had to play it). I can't imagine Google could possibly do any better with JPEG.

Re:Why NOT?

[squiggleslash]

Because it's not got a lot of momentum at this point, and other than compression quality it appears to be an inferior of JPEG - it lacks, apparently, the same degree of metadata.

If there's a major problem with the web right now it's the number of half-assed ill-thought out technologies that are already in there and that have to be supported permanently because someone out there might be still using it - and in many cases, they are, from GIFs to frames. Mozilla and Microsoft just threw IndexedDB into the mix, just to add another thing to fuck things up for another decade.

So yeah, I have to agree with Mozilla in this case that WebP shouldn't be accepted. Less is more.,

Re:That's dumb.

[Anonymous Coward]

No it is not dumb. Other than bloat there are support and security considerations. If it doesn't improve the status quo significantly why would you want to add work to already overloaded developers? Any code new code path can potentially add an exponential maintenance burden, slowing down future development. If it becomes an important format then the maintainer who rejected the patch has stated he is willing to re-evaluate letting the patch in. You really only ever want code in a project that you know the developers care about and are going to watch as well as have the knowledge to fix if a vulnerability is found.

Re:Why?

[tepples]

Any patent on compressing keyframes in a video is a patent on image compression.

Re:Why?

[errandum]

And?

Lossless compression: LZW, LZ77, LZ78 and variants. Most of these have expired by now and/or are free to use (PNG uses a variation of LZ77 and GIF uses LZW)

JPEG's lossy compression patent was invalidated in 2006, so everyone can use it.

Do you need more? Even if it's royalty free, it doesn't matter nowadays and it'll only contribute to make browsers heavy. Just leave it be.

Re:Why NOT?

[Snaller]

"but I think it's pretty obvious that WebM is destined for the same place as VESA and HD-VHS landed. Nice idea..... not adopted by the general public."

The public have no idea about graphics formats, nor do they give a crap.
If google were to make a ton of source code examples in everything from C to Visual Basic to Lisp or DOS showing how to read, write and save, and make many free programs to do conversion, then programmers might start using them.
Of course its google, and they rarely do things like that right.
So you are probably right, its going to die.