Mozilla apparently implementing WebP support for Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla apparently implementing WebP support for Firefox

bugzilla.mozilla.org

12 pointsd0ugie9 comments

Interesting. I would've thought they wouldn't support it anymore, considering there's an even smaller chance that Apple and Microsoft would support it, too. I was thinking that maybe they're waiting on the NETVC/Daala/Thor/VP10 video codec standardization by the IETF, which would then be followed by a new standard for images on the web based on the same technology. But I guess they're going with webp for now. I wonder why they finally decided to support webp.

Looking at the final string of comments on the previous thread, I suspect they are doing it because WebP has finally reached enough critical mass, in particular with some CDNs and mod_pagespeed (plus some user agent or accept header confusion if I recall), for continuing not to implement WebP simply making too little sense. Better late than never...

I mean this in the best possible way, but Mozilla -- more often that not -- tends to go along with Google's direction with regard to web platform APIs, supported file formats, etc.

In my recollection, their most high-profile disagreement was over WebSQL vs IndexedDB, where IndexedDB was championed by Mozilla with fervor I have rarely seen -- or rather, Mozilla straight-up declared they would never support WebSQL -- and in the end IndexedDB actually won out.

There seems to be a general mutual reciprocity [1] between the Chrome and Firefox teams, although in a mercantilist sense of Chrome introducing all sorts of stuff all the time, and Firefox implements them also within a few versions.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_t...

Can't really expect much else with the market share that Google has. They can implement anything they want, and it's halfway there to being a web standard. If Mozilla doesn't follow suit, they risk losing even more users, because webpage developers might just ignore Firefox or give it a worse fallback solution.

Importantly, the webp format supports animation, and is considerably more efficient than animated gif. [1]

[1] http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/fl_awebp/cell_an...

Yes, but is it as efficient as WebM?

The concept of creating animated images out of the index frame format of a video codec is pretty amusing to me. Just use the video codec if you want video.

This becomes a complicated discussion. In an img tag, a webp can degrade to gif, but that is not true of webm, which is not an image. And webp uses considerably less resources than webm.

It's probably also an easier sell to the more problematic browsers (you know who they are) to support webp than webm.

By degrade in an img tag you mean if the server does sniffing or content negotiation to send gif instead of webp?

> It's probably also an easier sell to the more problematic browsers

The only browser I can think of that does not support webm already but might conceivably add support for webp is Safari. Chrome, Firefox and Edge all support webm, and I don't see IE or Opera Mini adding webp support, since neither one is really in active development.

Maybe you're right that Safari is more likely to support webp than webm. It's hard to say.

FWIW, you can do content negotiation on the client side with the HTML5 picture element:

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/responsive/picture-el...

If a browser doesn't support that, it's probably not going to support the image format you're trying to negotiate anyway. In that case it's just going to fall back to the enclosed default img which is exactly what you'd want.

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