Mozilla rejects Google's WebP image format
arstechnica.com
Mozilla rejects Google's WebP image format
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: Mozilla rejects Google's WebP image format
#2It's important to note that this is a rejection of WebP, as it currently stands, not a forever rejection.
Re: Mozilla rejects Google's WebP image format
#3It's important to note that this is a rejection of WebP, as it currently stands, not a forever rejection.
Google announced more features for WebP at Google I/O (including lossless and animation amongst others). I've not seen any Mozillan response to that as yet.
Re: Mozilla rejects Google's WebP image format
#4I find that Jeff Muizelaar's argument (not Arstechnica but what they talked about) very weak. He said WebP is not good because:
* Jpeg has some fancy features not seen in WebP (4:4:4 YCrCb, CMYK support, etc)
* Jpeg's compression is "good enough", and nobody cares about diskspace (cited Facebook 85%, Flickr 96% quality level)
* If WebP, why not Jpeg XR?
* WebP has no alpha channel support!
* There are "low hanging fruit" in Jpeg optimization such as progressive encoding.
Each of these points in isolation may be valid, but together they give me the feeling that he was arguing surgically. He said Jpeg is already very good, Jpeg is actually bad but there are low hanging fruit to improve it, and whether Jpeg is good or bad doesn't matter because nobody cares.
Personally I feel the "75% is already very good" argument to be the weakness. Facebook pictures are very poor compared to the original, and if diskspace is not a problem they would have increased it to 96% like Flickr.
I hope Mozilla supports the format and let the users decide.
Re: Mozilla rejects Google's WebP image format
#5I've yet to see a compelling argument for why I should want a browser with WebP support. Unless images start out lossless, and then are encoded into WebP directly, all I'll ever get out of WebP is smaller images that have more encoder artifacts - and I don't want that. I've got plenty of bandwidth; I'd rather download images in their original JPEG or PNG formats, especially if that means I can then open them up in any image editor or viewer on my computer, instead of having to install some special (and likely buggy) new WebP viewer/converter.
I think if WebP offered useful features JPEG doesn't, like alpha channel support or support for higher bit depths or useful new metadata, that'd at least justify it, and people would be creating new demos that showed off the technology. We saw this with the uptake of support for PNG after people started showing how PNG's support for alpha transparency made it possible to do interesting things that you couldn't with JPEG/GIF. WebP has no such compelling feature.
Re: Mozilla rejects Google's WebP image format
#6I find that Jeff Muizelaar's argument (not Arstechnica but what they talked about) very weak. He said WebP is not good because: * Jpeg has some fancy features not seen in WebP (4:4:4 YCrCb, CMYK support, etc) * Jpeg's compression is "good enough", and nobody cares about diskspace (cited Facebook 85%, Flickr 96% quality level) * If WebP, why not Jpeg XR? * WebP has no alpha channel support! * There are "low hanging fr…
One possible reason to push for improvements before accepting the new format into Firefox is suggested by Justin Lebar in a comment on http://bugzil.la/600919:
"In general, Mozilla should use its weight to improve the web in the long term, even if doing so is unpopular in the short term. In this case, by not accepting WebP in its current form, we're putting pressure on its developers to improve it in the ways that we think are important. Once we accept the codec, we lose this leverage. [...] Remember that even if we landed this patch tomorrow, it would still likely be years before this format saw wide adoption. The argument is that it's better to wait and throw our weight behind something we think moves the web forward, if and when that arrives."
Re: Mozilla rejects Google's WebP image format
#7Google is essentially comparing WebP to JPEG right now like you would compare PDF to plain-text. They have a proof of concept ("look, the text appears on the screen!") that has a smaller file size but lacks any actual features. My concern is that once they implement all the features required of a mature image format (alpha, color modes, etc), size will be on par with another existing format.
Re: Mozilla rejects Google's WebP image format
#8Striving for a lower file size is inherently a good thing, but as disk space is becoming cheaper and cheaper and it's not as important anymore. Judging from the comparison gallery at http://code.google.com/speed/webp/gallery.html, it's not very impressing. The result is much more blocky and there is significant loss in detail in detail-concentrated areas.
Case in point: the first image of a landscape has two major noticeable artifacts: the shadow of the mountain (mid-right) reveals the blocky compression of WebP. Second, the compression algorithm tends to smooth out a lot of detail. Observe how the vegetation gets mushed out. The clouds as well (mostly on the top left).
Great for video, not so much for images (from the gallery above anyway). I would like to see a better comparison with WebP vs JPEG but compressed to about the same file size and with a RAW source (to remove any compression bias).
Re: Mozilla rejects Google's WebP image format
#9Google is essentially comparing WebP to JPEG right now like you would compare PDF to plain-text. They have a proof of concept ("look, the text appears on the screen!") that has a smaller file size but lacks any actual features. My concern is that once they implement all the features required of a mature image format (alpha, color modes, etc), size will be on par with another existing format.
My concern is that I don't see a roadmap for the missing features and there are existing next-gen codecs that already perform better than JPEG and do have those features.
Re: Mozilla rejects Google's WebP image format
#10Is "WONFTIX" a quirky Mozilla thing, or a typo of "WONTFIX"?