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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"
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.
Amen. When I first heard about this format I was excited. I thought finally we had a lossy image format that would have an alpha channel. I was shocked to discover this was not the case, that it was basically just a static frame of video, with nothing else.
It offers little to no advantage over JPEG.
I'm still bitter over JNG getting killed off. It is possible to hack around the lack of a good JNG using 2 JPEGs (one for the alpha) plus a bit of javascript and a , and this can even be styled in CSS with mozElement and the slightly less flexible webkit alternative. But I have to say, overall, I'm cheering for Microsoft's apparently open JPEG XR standard.
Never thought I'd be saying *that* :)
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
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.
"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