Hacker News Reader

Comment by birktj | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this exactly what animated WebP [1] is supposed to address?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP#Animation

Yes, and would Apple please support WebP in Safari as the only remaining holdout? Before we all just boycott Safari and go ahead and use WebP anyways.

boycott iOS? good luck...

No, boycott Safari. Just like the successful IE boycott on Windows.

There is no other rendering engine on iOS. You can’t “boycott Safari” on iOS in any meaningful way. WebKit is used by all browsers on iOS.

Safari can play MP4 directly from <img>, so it's actually best of all browsers in this area.

You should be mad at Google, who invented a whole new format based on obsolete VP8, which is even less efficient than its VP8-based WebM precursor. And it's literally because they couldn't make their VP9-capable decoder work in <img>. Animated WebP is Chrome's tech debt.

You might as well use APNG then, which is more widely supported too.

I believe webp images are generally smaller in size.

webp comes in lossy and lossless flavor. unless you want to degrade the gifs you would have to pick lossless and in that case it's not a clear win over apng even if we ignore the compatibility question.

A lossy 24-bit color webp image (which is encoded with VP8's intra-frame compression) is likely to look better than a 8-bit color palette lossless gif.

Unless it's pixel art (lossy webp is chroma-subsampled). Another issue is that it often is a reencode from a gif, so it's strictly lossy if you don't use a lossless format for the reencode.

GP is talking about APNG not GIF. APNG has 24bit with alpha transparency.

But this is in the context of what to use instead of gif. The point is, for many gifs (like say a short clip from a movie, or funny video) you can get a lossy webp that looks better than a gif, but and is smaller than an APNG.

Animated WebP has poor compression. It is based on WebM video, but it dropped most features that make videos small (but still kept the now-obsolete VP8 encoding, and added a second codec internally, which makes WebP decoding complex compared to GIF).

Why do we need another standard?

webm webp doesn't work everywhere (or very many places at all), you can't copy paste files around, it's mostly just (some) browser based.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com