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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.
Why do we need yet another image format?
New file format's can't cure something that user education requires.
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.
Quote: "Adopting a new image format in Web browsers is a big decision. Once a format becomes a part of the Web, it will have to be supported in perpetuityâ"adding overhead to the browserâ"even if it largely fizzles and only gains a small niche following."
It's akin to if Web browsers were required to support failed formats like ANIM or HAM or IFF. In other words adding support for WebM wastes space in the program (and computer memory).
And I'm probably going to get modded -1 for comparing WebM to "failed formats" like HAM, 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.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.,
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Currently, it only supports a subset of the features that JPEG has. It lacks support for any color representation other than 4:2:0 YCrCb. JPEG supports 4:4:4 as well as other color representations like CMYK. WebP also seems to lack support for EXIF data and ICC color profiles, both of which have be come quite important for photography. Further, it has yet to include any features missing from JPEG like alpha channel support.
[...]
Every image format that becomes “part of the Web platform” exacts a cost for all time: all clients have to support that format forever, and there's also a cost for authors having to choose which format is best for them. This cost is no less for WebP than any other format because progressive decoding requires using a separate library instead of reusing the existing WebM decoder. This gives additional security risk but also eliminates much of the benefit of having bitstream compatibility with WebM. It makes me wonder, why not just change the bitstream so that it's more suitable for a still image codec?
WebP, by Jeff Muizelaar.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
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.
If webp supported alpha transparency it would be useful. png is a lossless format and therefore much bulkier. A png is normally 5 times bigger than jpg image. But jpg doesn't support transparency
As author of the Mozilla WebP patch, I can confirm that this was originally true. However, due to various shortcomings in design, WebP split off into its own codec library.
PNG is lossless
More specifically it's a lossless representation of a single layer RGB image.
better for photos then JPEG.
For display of photos on the web the huge filesize advantages of JPEG outweigh the minor reduction in quality.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
"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.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You mean like HD-DVD vs BluRay?