WebP Image Support Appears Ready For Firefox 65

After Microsoft added support for the WebP image format to their Edge browser last month, Mozilla is finally preparing to ship the Firefox browser with support for WebP. If all goes well, Firefox 65 will support WebP!

The WebP image format developed by Google and derived from VP8 technology has proven to hold a lot of potential for lossy and lossless compression compared to PNGs or animated GIFs. Chrome has long supported WebP along with other browsers like Opera and now with Edge supporting the format, Firefox has been the last major holdout after Mozilla abandoned earlier plans to support this BSD-licensed image format.

Fortunately, Mozilla developers recently restarted their effort on enabling WebP support and it looks like that could be squared away for Firefox 65. Overnight the WebP image support tracker was marked as resolved/fixed for Firefox 65. All of the WebP bits are now in place for Firefox!

But a few hours ago a bug was already re-opened about Firefox Nightly crashing when viewing WebP images. Hopefully any of those lingering bugs will get fixed up soon enough so Firefox 65 will indeed have WebP enabled by default. Firefox 65.0 is expected to be released by the end of January.