Firefox 77 Nightly Adds Initial AV1 Image File Support (AVIF)

[uid313]

I miss support for private fields using the hashpound syntax (#) in JavaScript classes in Firefox.

[Hibbelharry]

These are extremely old posts and in my own experience WebP is miles better than JPEG at the same visual quality. I've managed to compress my JPEG files (Quality: 96) to 99.9% similarly looking WebP's which are 40% from their JPEG originals. Quite major savings I'd say.

Also, for some reasons Google uses WebP extensively across all its products and now I see not only Google but Facebook/Instagram/Netflix as well. All major players who care about quality and bandwidth. No, there must be a different explanation.

The patch to add WebP support was created nine (!) years ago and it's not like it adds too much code or makes Firefox more insecure. No, it looks like the decision to delay it for so long was purely political rather than practical. This bug report has literally many dozens of people begging Mozilla to do it faster.

Another BIG feature of WebP is that it allows to make decently looking desktop images, vs. JPEG which turns text into a blurry mess or PNG which inflates images.

In reality the first versions of webp produced results worse than jpeg, in fact this was the case for years. It's quite more recent than 9 years that results got getter. Today it's expected to save around 30% of data compared to jpeg images of same size and quality.

Still Apple Browsers don't support webp, so it should still be practically avoided.

https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp

And the request to add MHTML support was created 20 years (!) ago. And there are no alternatives to this format at all.

You're mostly right, but demand is also low in the market.

Finally something useful for the user.
In my opinion after the HTML5 features, they should work on improving the picture, video and audio support.
I was getting really tired with their VR nonsense.

Another useless and shortsighted rant from Danny3, as always. Jeez...

Mozilla did a lot for their users, like pushing quantum components for speed, webstandards, new preferences, new technology,...

[skeevy420]

When did you escape from the loony bin? It's a 100% open standard used by hundreds of companies who want to save bandwidth while preserving the image quality.

--------------------------------------->The Joke



You<-----

Joking aside, open standard or not, Google does have the muscle and money to make deals to get others to use their formats. Plenty of great open standards over the years have fallen by the wayside because their makers didn't have the ability to get everyone else to adopt it (which is why so many things apply to XKCD standards).

It is more that Google maintains Chrome/Chromium which has by far the most dominant share in the browser market. Edge didn't implement WebP support either till they moved over to the Chromium codebase. Safari didn't implement it for all this time either

That makes a lot of sense since it seems like the biggest factor in an image format being adopted is web browser support.

[skeevy420]

Michael

But it didn't flag me yesterday when I called him a R-worded MF-er...

[intelfx]

When did you escape from the loony bin?

When did you?

[Grinch]

WebP didn't represent a significant improvement over the status quo

I agree with this if we are talking lossy, but for lossless, WebP was a MASSIVE improvement over PNG, with MUCH better compression and extremely fast decompression.

What's even weirder is that Mozilla are just now supporting AVIF, when Jpeg XL is being standardised as a royalty free image codec this summer. For those that aren't aware, Jpeg XL has both great lossy compression AND great lossless compression (even better than WebP), which includes being able to losslessly recompress existing jpeg files giving an additional ~20% compression.

There's a very good chance that Jpeg XL will quickly become the new de facto standard image codec when it is released this year due to the fantastic upgrade path for existing Jpeg files (which is by FAR the most used image format), and suddenly now Mozilla is adding the support burden of AVIF... I really don't get how they are thinking.

Why not wait until Jpeg XL is released, do comparative analysis and look at what the overall uptake is, and then decide if you want to support either or both codecs.

[birdie]

When did you?

And why is that exactly? Did I say anything wrong? Did I accuse Google of bribing other companies in order to adopt a worthless image standard which doesn't bring any benefits to the customer? Or Mr. skeevy420 has some sort of following here so whatever BS he says you love it? Or maybe I wasn't factual in my first reply in the topic after which skeevy420 uttered his inanity?

[birdie]

I agree with this if we are talking lossy, but for lossless, WebP was a MASSIVE improvement over PNG, with MUCH better compression and extremely fast decompression.

What's even weirder is that Mozilla are just now supporting AVIF, when Jpeg XL is being standardised as a royalty free image codec this summer. For those that aren't aware, Jpeg XL has both great lossy compression AND great lossless compression (even better than WebP), which includes being able to losslessly recompress existing jpeg files giving an additional ~20% compression.

There's a very good chance that Jpeg XL will quickly become the new de facto standard image codec when it is released this year due to the fantastic upgrade path for existing Jpeg files (which is by FAR the most used image format), and suddenly now Mozilla is adding the support burden of AVIF... I really don't get how they are thinking.

Why not wait until Jpeg XL is released, do comparative analysis and look at what the overall uptake is, and then decide if you want to support either or both codecs.

It's worthless to argue with most Phoronix commenters here. If it's an open source company, they are literal Gods and their actions shouldn't be doubted or questioned. If a company creates proprietary software (Google: Google Chrome, Google Play Services and other proprietary Android features) or hardware (NVIDIA) - they are an evil incarnate and must be ridiculed and condemned even if they contribute to Open Source quite a lot.

[quikee]

There are/were quite some arguments against adapting WebP:
- bit stream was not frozen until a year ago (with WebP 1.0 release)
- only chromium based web browsers supported it and there wasn't a demand to add support from other big players
- the lossy compression of WebP (VP8) doesn't break apart as quickly as JPEG at high compression ratios, but when you allow for enough bits, then JPEG eventually equalizes an overtakes WebP in quality (at least when compressed with libvpx, which produces magenta hue no matter what compression ratio is used).
- most JPEG encoders didn't implement state of the art compression techniques (trellis quant), which lead to creation of MozJPEG encoder
- lossless in WebP is quite good, but it uses a completely different compression algorithm - also BTW. JPEG XL some parts of that now too

Mozilla eventually gave in and added support when AOMedia was established - the same reason why AVIF is supported so quickly now. It is also kind.of important as they compete against HEIC, which will have a hard time when no browser supports it.

As for JPEG XL - it has some of the similar advantages that JPEG has over WebP - it's a image codec, better for compressing images when you allow for enough bits. It breaks down at higher compression ratios (can't really compete against AVIF at how low in size it can go without breaking down). It has a really good lossless mode and you can actually choose an arbitrary bit depth (8-16 bits per channel). I think JPEG XL is the future of image codecs, but there is place for AVIF too.

WebP 2.0 is also in the works, which has implemented some very interesting things (suitable for images only), but it's still far away.

[cl333r]

Finally something useful for the user.
In my opinion after the HTML5 features, they should work on improving the picture, video and audio support.
I was getting really tired with their VR nonsense.

How do you nazzi that VR is around the corner? The corner from a galaxy far far away.