WebP Image Support Appears Ready For Firefox 65

[Michael]

I thought it already had WebP support? I recall an effort in 2014/15 to bring WebP support to Firefox, was that the effort that was cancelled?

Yes they dropped it before shipping it.

[Creak]

FYI the crash is on an animated WebP image. But I guess it'll be fixed soon, now that the biggest part of the feature has been merged.

At last, Firefox was lagging behind in that matter and I never understood their argument that JPEG should be enough. JPEG doesn't have alpha channel, so no, it's clearly not enough. PNG is lossless, which is fine in some cases, but if you want to prevent bandwidth, it's still better to prefer lossy compression format. And GIF... well it's about time we get rid of GIFs.. the compression is simply atrocious! And I hope one day it will be as easy to post a video than to post an animated GIF; I mean... animated images is the bare definition of a "video", and the video algorithm are way better at that (strangely ).

[shmerl]

And I hope one day it will be as easy to post a video than to post an animated GIF; I mean... animated images is the bare definition of a "video", and the video algorithm are way better at that (strangely ).

Hopefully. The last hold out of closed codecs freaks fell, when Apple joined Alliance for Open Media. So in the future posting a video will be as easy as posting an image, you'll just use <video> tag instead of <img> tag.

[wswartzendruber]

Wait a second, this was requested years ago, and now that AVIF is on the horizon...now they add WebP!?

[microcode]

Is there any image format based on Daala? WebP was heavily criticized in the past, and it doesn't look like it got any better.

Basically all of the Daala effort was redirected toward AV1, and with the AV1 spec now finalized, AVIF (AV1 image format) is in the works. I don't know how long it'll be before somebody supports it in a browser, but it is promising. You can try out the AV1-20180222 Tiny profile images and compare them to various others on this page (including an I-Frame only Daala): https://wyohknott.github.io/image-formats-comparison/ Though be careful when comparing rates for pik, especially the lower profiles, make sure to validate the bitrates because pik just chooses not to encode images too small.


There's also something out of Google called pik https://github.com/google/pik which looks promising. It is sometimes up to twice as efficient for perceptually-lossless images as AV1, and ~5x better than JPEG; but conversely sometimes somewhat worse (but sometimes dramatically better) for medium-quality images, and usually considerably worse than AV1 for very low-quality images.

[Grinch]

Wait a second, this was requested years ago, and now that AVIF is on the horizon...now they add WebP!?

AVIF is primarily a lossy format since that is where it's strenght lies, Webp has an ok lossy format but importantly (imo) the best lossless format currently in terms of compression/performance.

It blows PNG out of the water both in terms of compression ratio and compression/decompression speed, so if we could replace PNG as the de facto lossless format with Webp there would be great gains.

[nanonyme]

I would like to see support for:

• Wayland
• CSS font 'system-ui' (native platform font)
• <dialog> element.
• Input type datetime-local, week, and month for <input> elements.

It's looking like the Firefox Flatpak will ship with Wayland enabled once it's finalized

[TemplarGR]

So what? systemd and Wayland were also criticized.
Being criticized != being bad.
I for one like WebP a lot, it's better than GIF and PNG, has a lot better API, and those who criticized it were mainly either misinformed or stupid (just like those guys who were defending X11 over Wayland). I didn't see any valid set of arguments proving PNG or GIF are better than WebP other than WebP not yet being supported which isn't a fair argument.

People who defend X11 and claim it is perfect and there is no need for a change are stupid.

People who actually believe Wayland is a good replacement for X11 are imbeciles.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

<dialog> support should be landing soon, it's been available under an about:config flag for a while now.

That's not an option on deployments.

[zamadatix]

That's not an option on deployments.

Correct, which is why I said "landing soon" not "has landed"