Mozilla Rejects WebP Image Format, Google Adds It 262
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do we need yet another image format?
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We don't, especially now that most patents related to image compression are past us.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
Why do we need yet another image format?
If a new format 1. has an alpha channel, 2. has demonstrably better SSIM than JPEG, and 3. preserves Exif and ICC metadata, then it's superior to JPEG. In theory, WebP should have demonstrably because it's based on VP8 keyframes, while JPEG uses much the same technique as MPEG-1 keyframes. But it lacks an alpha channel, and it lacks Exif and ICC.
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JPEG uses much the same technique as MPEG-1 keyframes. But it lacks an alpha channel, and it lacks Exif and ICC.
JPEG supports a plethora of metadata including Exif, IPTC, XMP and according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] also supports ICC.
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But we already have a new format that does all that, it's called JPEG XR.
JPEG XR license problems (Score:3)
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Actually, JPEG doesn't lack ICC, or EXIF. Every camera that makes JPEG files embeds EXIF. Any suitable photo editor can embed ICC profiles as well.
I'll agree that the lack of alpha channel sucks, and that JPEG's lossy compression can be improved, but it's simply untrue that neither EXIF nor ICC can't be embedded. I do it all the time.
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A lossy format with alpha channel is something I've been wishing for for years now.
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Opera Turbo uses WebP to compress images on low bandwidth connections
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/04/opera-turbo-uses-webp-to-compress.html [blogspot.com]
WebP looks better than JPEG at high compression ratios where JPEG has noticeable blocking artifacts.
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
You would be surprised; JPEG2000 is used extensively by high-compression PDF. As a standalone image format it's pretty lousy but for scanned documents it's actually really great. We have literally millions of pages stored this way where I work.
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JPEG2000 can work quite well for images, as well.
There's a bunch of old panoramic maps at the Library of Congress [loc.gov] which are available in JPEG2000. The amount detail preserved in these offerings is astounding (at least to me).
I mention this only because, as already pointed out, nobody much bothers with the format and, and good examples can be hard to come by. And old maps are cool.
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Last, replace in the above Google with "raster-image content provider" and the above still stand true.
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Personally, I won't care until I see an image that I can't view. /then/ I'll get upset. /not/ working, you don't care.
It's a lot like SVG glyph-fonts: Until you run into it
That being said, it's not like it's a big deal to implement webp in FF: The webm decoder will decode it, provided you change the webp "wrapper" to a webm one... so there's a JS script out there to add support for it right now.
Seems like it'd be just a handful of lines of code to add it natively, then there'd be no issues....
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Instead we'll get yet another block coding format, for what? So that Google can use it to leverage WebM?
Its not the image format that's the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
New file format's can't cure something that user education requires.
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Sorry, typo. My excuse: I'm on a laptop keyboard.
Re:Its not the image format that's the problem (Score:4, Funny)
I don't understand how you can accidentally an apostrophe into the sentence just because it's a laptop keyboard.
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Re:Its not the image format that's the problem (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, sorry, didn't see your laptop keyboard.
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Why NOT? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why NOT? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Why NOT? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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"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.
Even if Google made source code available for it for the whole world in all the languages conceivable, you still need to get people to generate images in it. Even if ever image generation/modification software had the option to save to WebP, the vast majority of users would still save the images to JPEG because (as we have discussed above) they don't give a crap about image standards and they know what JPEG is and that it works. They won't care if another format is ever-so-slightly-better and will stick wit
We're talking about WebP, not WebM (Score:3)
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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.
I'm assuming you mean VESA Local Bus, because VESA is alive and well. Well alive anyway; they're still as bone headedly stupid as ever. Actually on second thoughts you probably did mean VESA and you're right.
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.... 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.
You mean VESA graphics modes? The ones supported by every video card since ~1998? The ones used in Windows Vista-7 for graphical setup and video fallback? If you like installing a Linux distro with the graphical user interface, you should be thanking the Video Electronics Standards Organization for making a common way of talking to all video cards.
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Yea, looks like this poster is mixing up WebP and WebM. jwz also compared WebP to WebM and Wave [jwz.org]. While WebP is based on WebM, the purpose for creating WebP and WebM are different.
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I don't care about annotations, because I think they are annoying most of the time. The only one that I've encountered was the lack of a true full screen mode. (Hit F11) The real thing is that many videos are unavailable in WebM, but it seems like more and more are becoming available. I'd say flash is buggier. For a while flash crashed instantly on my computer because it was trying to use a feature not available on my cpu. And lets not forget about security holes.
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Mod parent up!
Personally, I'l watch some videos in the html5 player(blocked by default with noscript of course), but being able to easily save-as with DownThemAll is very nice.
I've got a greasemonkey script for grabbing everything else, too, but I prefer webm videos over h264.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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That mere fact that I am reading this article indicates that WebP has enough momentum to potentially be useful. The fact that other browser(s) are adding support is even more relevant. So the real question I believe is what wouldn't they add it? It's not costing anything, and (apparently) it's already been developed. So what's the issue?!
Not it doesn't. It means you read articles on Slashdot--a site that represents probably 0.00001% of all Internet users interests.
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It is on Slashdot not because it has a lot of momentum, but because it is being heavily pushed by Google. If it were anybody other than Google, we wouldn't still be talking about WebP. That, and Google makes a browser so at least one browser will support it.
This isn't much different if Microsoft tried pushing their own format.
I understand what Google is saying about licensing, but in the real world it won't make much difference.
PNG was introduced in a similar fashion to work around GIF legal issues. PNG is
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And to exacerbate PNG adoption, there are two animated derivatives that aren't supported across all browsers. Mozilla supports their APNG, while everything else (except IE, of course) supports MNG. I'd sure like to make animations with alpha and have it be visible in all browsers (except IE, of course).
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That mere fact that I am reading this article indicates that WebP has enough momentum to potentially be useful.
Google is the one that is pushing Webp [cnet.com]. They acquired the video compression codecs through their takeover of on2 technologies [techcrunch.com] for $106 million. Duh that they are going to add it in their cloud services.
You are reading that the largest open source web browser says no, which would be a lower hurdle than than trying to get it supported in Internet Explorer (which it won't anytime soon, because WebP in HTML5 is not only a Adobe Flash video replacement, but also a Microsoft Silverlight video replacement). Those
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Because people using old unupdated browsers will then fail to see the web properly as a new loosely supported format enters the fray.
People think of web browsers as IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and the other desktop browsers, but they forget how many people are using older mobile phones and so forth, browsing the web on older tablet devices, browsing it on TVs and devices plugging into TVs with web browsers and so on that simply may not be updated anymore. By introducing a new image format you've got to reco
That's dumb. (Score:2)
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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
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Re:That's dumb. (Score:5, Informative)
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PPM support has been removed many years back, XBM support was removed about a year ago.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504822 [mozilla.org]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197530 [mozilla.org]
Why did they remove PPM? Surely it can't have been more than, say, 30 lines of code!
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Yea, unlike PPM and XBM, APNG is useful. It basically replaces animated GIFs. It is unfortunate that no other browsers support it.
Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Or PNG unseating GIF.
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Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
Your history is backwards:
The iPod first launched on October 23, 2001, and it played MP3s just fine at that time.
The iTunes Music Store opened on April 28, 2003. Prior to this, Apple didn't sell content for the devices.
Apple never "caved," they simply built an MP3 player which happened to be successful. Later on, they started selling content for it (in the arguably more space-efficient AAC format).
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It could happen, but it needs to be *actually better*. To even have a chance of succeeding I'd say a new image format needs:
1. Alpha channel support.
2. Lossless *and* lossy compression.
3. Should be suitable for photos (JPEG), diagrams (PNG), and mixtures (e.g. screenshots of web pages). Don't tell me this is impossible - it's not.
4. Support decoding of subsets of the image (i.e. tiling).
5. EXIF.
6. Good support for multiple colour spaces.
7. Progressive decoding.
8. Better compression than JPEG.
WebP fails on
"As the WebP image format exists currently, (Score:2)
Quality community driven, bottom up open source software at work!
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A few days ago Slashdot posted a story about how Groups can make very, very poor decisions, especially when religious-like battles are involved (JPEG vs. WebP). You need someone at the top to make educated decisions based upon practical concerns ("Can Mozilla afford to support a JPEG v.Webp war?") rather than have a wikipedia-style community squabble break out.
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Total sidenote: x264 is an h.264 encoder. h.264 is the actual codec.
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Google has said that they'd drop support for h.264 - but the current release versions of Chrome still include support for it.
It remains to be seen when/if they will actually drop support.
Picasa (Score:2)
Picasa? I would think the stronger indicator of support would be Chrome, but then again, Google's schizophrenic position on codec support ("We're rejecting H.264 video in the name of openness! Now enjoy the bundled Adobe Flash plugin and MP3/AAC playback.") makes them difficult to gauge.
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They're not that irrational. They want to kill H.264 because they're not in the patent pool for it. Flash helps them do that, even if it is the nuclear option.
Backwards Logic (Score:2)
WebM has a clear advantage when the alternative is not letting your users view video on pages that serve WebM. Other than that, evaluating the advantages of one video format versus another is up to the video producer not the video consumer.
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Seems Solid (Score:5, Informative)
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 [blogspot.com].
alpha transparency (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:alpha transparency (Score:5, Interesting)
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* :)
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"plus a bit of javascript and a <canvas>"
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Hmm, nice to see that JPEG XR actually supports some decent HDR pixel formats (OpenEXR [openexr.org] 16-bit float RGB, and the Radiance [lbl.gov] shared-exported format) -- IIRC, its progenitors at MS were notably inferior in this area.
Now if they can only get the patent situation sorted to everybody's satisfaction, and some good free libraries get written, it might actually be a contender!
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Google already stated that alpha transparency is going to be added.
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Alpha is just another color channel. What the fuck is the big deal that it isnt already implemented? This is one of Googles big problems. They are treating these formats like they treat just about everything else they do... perpetual beta.
What developer wants to constantly be checking up on googles progress, and who the fuck wants their own patch schedules partially dictated by googles meanderings? I mean what the fuck... Alpha in WebP will be d
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First of all, Google is not even pushing this format. All they've done is shared their early work with us. It's "us" who decided to submit patches to Mozilla and the like, so all this overreacting you're doing here isn't even necessary. Had Google actually released this and advertised it, pushed it, and tried to have it used everywhere, then I would see why this discussion is even happening at all.
All I see is a bunch of people overreacting to some random project that someone at Google put together.
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All I see right now is a twit that doesnt want WebP to already be a failure.
Is OSS going backwards? (Score:3)
And? (Score:2)
The entire premise of the article is that Firefox, a web browser, didn't add support for a new fringe picture format, something that isn't really the purpose of the program but they're falling behind because Picasa, a program exclusively for showing pictures did? I should think an image program would be the first to add a new image format.
Am I the only one who thinks the author is an idiot?
A silly statement (Score:2)
"However, as the article explains, Google sees enough value in WebP to add it as a supported image format for Picasa."
s/Google/Microsoft/
s/Picasa/Windows/
We need a new format: .goo (Score:2)
Google will create and maintain it and it can be any kind of file at all--image, document, movie, slide deck, virtual machine HDD image, whatever. There will be a few bytes at the beginning of the file to tell Chrome how to deal with it. It will integrate nicely with all of Google's services. Everyone else can either support it or not.
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You mean like Linux did years ago?
Is it a problem (Score:2)
That google makes their own browser? At this point, they can add support for any feature or format that they want and then they can start using that feature or format on youtube or piccasa or one of their other sites and basically strong arm other browsers to support that feature because google controls some of the most popular sites on the internet. I could see how this might turn into an issue especially if chrome takes a sufficiently large chunk of the browser market.
JPEG 2000 (Score:3)
1) We know that JPEG 2000 (part 1) is most likely truly freely licensable. It was designed this way, and has been around for many years and used by deep pocketed companies for digital cinema, this I suspect any submarine patents would have surfaces by now. I can't say the same for WebP, WebM, or even H.264.
2) JPEG 2000 can have whatever color components you want. If you want a component to be an alpha channel, that is great, do it.
3) JPEG 2000 was developed by and international standards organization, so you know a lot of eyes saw the specification during development to ensure it is a well defined standard.
4) JPEG 2000 has a lossless option.
Old formats still dominant (Score:2)
Web P was weird from the start. Somebody said "hey, we can just rip that part out and call it a still image format". It's some google programmers hello world that crossed some PR guys desk...
Still, it's further proof of my motto... The earliest codes were based on decades of amazing research and development, and frankly, did everything right. They were designed for transparent reproduction at high bit rates, not low quality junk, so there's room for alternatives there. But across a wide range of scenar
Why not as a TIFF plugin? (Score:3)
I'm by no means an image expert, so read this as a question and not a suggestion: why isn't this implemented as a compression format for TIFFs? My understanding is that a TIFF is basically a bunch of metadata wrapped around a chunk of image data. I mean, look at the output of tiffinfo sometimes. I have a hard time believing WebP could require metadata than TIFF already supports, but you could add new private fields if it does. Given that you already have a (to my eyes) perfectly usable container, it seems like a waste not to use it.
Interstingly (Score:3)
pretty much all his argument could have been used on why NOT to use Mozilla when it was new.
Something that's being overlooked here is size. WebP is about half the size of an equivalent Jpg.
Of course, ti really won't go too fer until the add the alpha ability.
After which I expect it to make some quick jumps on the way to becoming the standard.
For no other reason then every cloud based storage is going to want users to use it.
I have 40+Gigs of Jpgs. We aren't even very active with the picture. Some people know seem to be constantly taking picture, so I'm sure there have 100's of Gigs worth of Jpgs. The value add of cutting the image size in half is huge. Not just for storage, but for transferring from smart phones.
It also occurs to me that cutting the image size in half would be desirable form telco that support smart phones on their systems.
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post photos much? png kinda sucks for textures.
Re:"Advantages over JPEG" (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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PNG files can be 10 times bigger than JPG's, and I doubt you always need lossless compression, especially when JPG actually does a good job.
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Because that makes the compression ratio of PNG go to shit.
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Also look at audio: For most applications, lossy formats like MP3 and Vorbis are perfectly fine. Even video games with bombastic sound use Vorbis rather than Flac t
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any encoder can be SSIM or psychovisually optimized. that's not really a valid argument.
also, JPEG encoders, save for a moment of genius in somebody out there, are about as optimized as they're likely to get. VP8 offers some wiggle-room to make pictures a little better.
the metadata argument is a bit misleading too - any file can be tagged, and most JPEG tagging as we know it is a hack on the original format. no reason that can't happen to another format.
i see no problem with supporting a new format, even
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>>>i see no problem with supporting a new format, even if nobody uses it. browsers still support frames, don't they?
Glad you brought that up, because it's a perfect example of an Inefficiency. Imagine if, 15 years ago, Mozilla had decided not to adopt frames. The result today would be a leaner, less RAM-intensive browser.
I think that's what the current Mozilla lead is trying to avoid - not wasting resources on an Image format that in 2020 will be as little used as frames are today. He probably t
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care to 'splain how frame support makes browsers slow when we almost never see sites with frames? it'd be a few extra kb on your hard disk, but that aside i don't see a problem.
bloat isn't caused by supporting standard features, however obscure. it comes from trying too hard to do stuff that no other competitor does, and failing at it.
i think the reason firefox is so very slow these days has little to do with frame support, and i doubt that not supporting webp is going to make it render pages faster. it
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean like HD-DVD vs BluRay?
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More like Pepsi vs. New Coke.
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Being able to choose among ~25 different car makers is great. Competition is good. It leads to reduced prices as the companies battle one another.
BUT if each one of those cars forced you to only drive on Ford or Honda or VW-built roads, because each car had a different wheel width (format), then that would be bad. Being forced into lock-in takes away the freedom of customer choice (and leads to higher prices, since the consumer is stuck).
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Er, yes?
Competition is good when I am choosing between a Sony or Panasonic Blu-Ray player. I can easily compare their price and features and make a personal decision. The existence of competition between implementations guarantees me lower prices and more features.
Format wars are bad when I am trying to decide whether to buy a Blu-Ray player or an HD-DVD player. I am f
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With old-style, ASIC-based single-function devices, sure. These days, however, with multi-hundred-gb harddisks and general processors in anything, format shouldn't matter so long as it's free to decode: Just add a decoder module!
I mean, on Windows, if something won't play, you just download a freewae codec pack(Like the K-Lite one), and now you have support for hundreds of formats. The user doesn't need to know or care which format it was, just that the "universal" decoder now plays it.
With linux it's mostl
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No kidding? Google sees value in a format they themselves developed? Next you're going to try to tell me Microsoft sees a lot of value in OOXML.
I guess they don't see a lot of value in it, since Microsoft still don't fully support OOXML yet!
But you are right, that was a bit of an unnecessarily trollish wording in the summary. It is hardly surprising that a program that is designed for working with images might have more file format support than a program that just uses images to spruce up a web page.
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Yes, putting in systems that make it more open, available to every one, and make the web use a better experience is exactly the same as what MS did when it create specific ways where there proprietary formats were used and then developers had to use their tools~
Yes, we should create a process for anything new to be adopted on the web, that would work so well~