
The irony of Apple homepage and Safari WebP support - v3nom
https://mobilerank.co/post/apple-homepage-webp-irony
======
jws
That is to save 146KB on one image an 99KB on another, to save 2 seconds you'd
have to using a 1mbps connection.

The first random internet article I pulled for real world cellular speeds
suggests even unwired, people are getting 30mbps so that changes the article
to:

 _Apple could load 66ms faster by adopting WebP_

… but these are cached resources, so maybe…

 _Apple could perform the initial load 66ms faster by adopting WebP_

… would be better.

Looking at the assets needed for an initial load, the fonts alone weigh in at
about twice those images, so it probably wouldn't be noticeable.

~~~
xrisk
1) “real world” cellular speeds at 30mbps? That sounds ludicrous to me. Maybe
in America, definitely not in many countries across the world.

2) I don’t know a lot of people who are repeat visitors to apple.com.
Mentioning the fact that the time is initial load time would be redundant.

~~~
thomaslord
> Maybe in America I'd say maybe _outside_ America. Our cell service is pretty
> terrible if you leave major metropolitan areas, or if you try to actually
> use your "unlimited" data.

~~~
LyndsySimon
It’s inconsistent.

I live in rural Arkansas, and typical get about 50Mpbs via LTE in a hammock on
the shore of the lake.

------
isoprophlex
Firstly, i don't get what apple has to gain by not supporting webp...
Nevertheless:

The screenshot puzzles me, it shows two assets, and states that compressing
these by an extra ~ 250 kb would save 2 seconds. Maybe on very slow
connections?

Also

> Lack of proper support for [...] web notifications on mobile

I can do without these i guess

~~~
jamil7
The author didn't actually compare the different images in each encoding with
examples of file size and image quality tradeoffs, just a screenshot from
lighthouse.

------
jakub_g
Note that it's not only Apple who's been slow to adopt WebP. Mozilla was
pretty skeptical for many years and only implemented this ~a year ago (instead
they did a lot of improvements to JPEG encoders in the meantime).

At this point I'd be more interesting in Safari supporting AVIF, though for
compat reasons WebP would be nice to have as well.

I'm not defending Apple, but I think the issue is that if Apple implements a
new file format, it has to work reliably _across whole Apple ecosystem_ (OS,
image editing programs), not only in the browser. This is probably a huge
undertaking. You don't want to download a picture and then your image viewer
not being able to open it.

------
xenonite
This is only one half of the story. Given the increased network bandwidth,
decoding speed matters. And here, JPEG is much faster. Also note that the JPEG
decompression algorithms are highly optimized and coded in assembly language,
and there are maybe even hardware decoders.

On android:

WebP 66% less file size than JPG, 267% more time to decode.

WebP 38% less file size than JPG, 258% more time to decode.

WebP 89% less file size than JPG, 319% more time to decode.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37812950/jpg-vs-webp-
per...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37812950/jpg-vs-webp-performance-
on-android)

~~~
baybal2
On Android, JPG decoder lib may or may not use a DSP on Qualcomm SoCs, WebP
doesn't have any hardware decoding support.

Any size gains will be much more noticeable in the context of network
transmission.

~~~
chrisandchris
Which comes back to people having good phones most probably will have better
internet and people habing cheap phones will have less good internet.

So you‘ll lose time either on transfer or decoding.

------
kijin
I get the argument, but the estimated savings are bogus.

All the images on the mobile version of apple.com add up to a grand total of
500KB. If reducing their sizes by ~40% (that is, 200KB) would save 2.25s, it
means the whole page (just over 3.5MB) currently takes 40 seconds to load. But
obviously nobody in the developed world is waiting 40 seconds for apple.com to
load. The real savings are probably somewhere between 0.05s and 0.5s depending
on network conditions. Not insignificant, but much less than what is promised.

If you really wanted to minimize the time it takes to load apple.com, you
should start with the 10 scripts, 7 stylesheets, and 9 webfonts that together
make up over 80% of the page size and consume a considerable amount of
resources to parse and execute. But the benchmark doesn't tell you that. It's
just a checklist of micro-optimizations that doesn't even start with realistic
assumptions.

------
gardaani
I'm happy that Apple hasn't adopted WebP. JPEG XL and AVIF are better formats.
Even Google is considering creating WebP2. WebP is already an outdated format
(no HDR support), which should just die.

~~~
tarkin2
Disagree.

There's various web standards that export to webp: web recording, video
conferencing etc. [1]

Apple have effectively veto'd a web standard, pushing developers and users
into their ecosystem yet again.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/MediaRecord...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/MediaRecorder/isTypeSupported)

~~~
ksec
>web recording, video conferencing

Why cant those be done on H.264?

~~~
tarkin2
Whether they can or can’t is besides the question.

They’re not in the standard.

And Apple have thereby again damaged an open standard’s wider-scale adoption.

------
mojuba
At the expense of quality, at least it was Apple's argument against supporting
webp.

And no, they didn't ignore it, it was included in one of the previous betas of
macOS and iOS and removed later. Don't remember which.

~~~
jamil7
I was also wondering about this and what exactly happened there, I wonder if
there are some underlying issues either technical or political there.

~~~
josho
Or equally possible they didn’t see meaningful real world improvements?

~~~
jamil7
Yeah sure but why implement it at all in a beta? I remember reading that years
ago employees from both Mozilla and Apple looked into the format and both
concluded it wasn't worth implementing. Firefox dragged it's feet with this
too and eventually caved early last year, probably due to pressure from web
developers looking at Google's lighthouse score telling them to use webp.

------
ksec
Apple doesn't even support their own HEIF on Safari. Why would one expect them
to support WebP? Not to mention the gain on WebP is actually relatively small.
JPEG, despite its age is still getting encoder improvement.

You would have expected or assumed nearly 30 years since the introduction of
JPEG, we could compress an image at 0.5 bpp ( bit per pixel ) that has higher
quality than the best JPEG with 1.0 bpp.

It turns out that is still not the case, Not with WebP, AVIF is closer but
still not there. Just like in Audio, Despite all the marketing claims about
mp3pro, HE-AAC... etc having mp3 128kbps quality at half the bitrate. It took
us nearly 30 years to get an Audio Codec that sounds better than the best mp3
encoder at lower than 128Kbps bitrate. And that was Opus at 96Kbps. ( At this
point no body cares about those bitrate savings any more )

That is not to say image compression aren't improving. [1] Is an 4K image
compressed by the next generation VVC _Reference_ Encoder at 350KB.

[1] [https://imgsli.com/MTI1NDA](https://imgsli.com/MTI1NDA)

------
aeonflux
Could anyone one please tell me what is the purpose of the Web Notifications,
other than invasive marketing.

~~~
snazz
They're useful on desktop, for having things like Gmail open in the
background, but they're not hugely useful on mobile. Usually if you want
notifications you would already have the app installed.

~~~
jtbayly
The whole point is that if Apple would allow this, you wouldn't _have_ to
install the app. You could just use the website.

Forums are an example where the website is perfectly fine without an app, but
I'd really like to be able to choose whether or not I get push notifications
from them on my phone.

------
rmsaksida
> The irony comes from the fact that Apple decided not to add WebP support to
> the Safari browser

I don't get it. Why is this ironic? Did Apple create the performance
optimisation tool that suggested WebP?

~~~
xrisk
It’s ironic because it’s apple.com that of all sites would benefit from Apple
supporting WebP. (according to the author, not me)

------
ezoe
"Apple can save the load time if they use the WebP"

Says the writer who use jpeg on his article.

~~~
ben509
He probably has to support Safari...

------
tbolt
Could this be related to non-network performance? The WebKit team seems very
conservative in adding features to preserve/balance CPU usage and Battery
Consumption. Which I generally applaud them for.

~~~
Jyaif
In general it's far better to reduce network usage in exchange for more CPU
processing, not to mention that with faster websites you save on screen time
as well.

------
hmottestad
Apple.com loads in around 1 to 1.5 seconds on either of my phone or my
macbook. This is on wifi though, I guess the article presumes 4g.

------
olah_1
The webp issue is truly infuriating. I'd like to support it in my own
websites, but I literally can't since a huge chunk of visitors use Safari.

The only hope seems to be mobile linux initiatives like PinePhone, etc. But
I'm not holding my breath.

~~~
thomasfoster96
> I'd like to support it in my own websites, but I literally can't since a
> huge chunk of visitors use Safari.

Wouldn’t using the <picture> element[0] allow this this? It’s pretty widely
supported (every browser that supports WebP and Safari)[1] and allows a
fallback to a JPEG in an <img> tag.

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/pi...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/picture)

[1] [https://caniuse.com/#feat=picture](https://caniuse.com/#feat=picture)

~~~
frabert
Would this be susceptible to tracking issues? E.g. place a hidden picture that
loads WebP or PNG otherwise, to track which users support it and which don't

~~~
cmg
Browsers tend to advertise what formats they accept outside of a very basic
set to the server on requests via the HTTP Accept header:
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Accept)

For example, Firefox on macOS sent this Accept header for this request:
text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp, _/_ ;q=0.8

Chrome sent
text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,
_/_ ;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9

------
fortran77
1\. Apple's users won't care. The ones who know about "WebP" will explain it
away by claiming "Apple rejected it because it doesn't meet their high quality
standards. The page looks more beautiful this way; WebP will drain the
battery; WebP isn't secure; etc."

2\. I'm pretty sure this isn't "irony."
[https://www.dictionary.com/browse/irony?s=t](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/irony?s=t)

------
CharlesW
As an experiment I grabbed all the images from v/home/f/images/iphone-
takeover.

Originals: 584 KB for 18 files. After running them through ImageOptim: 353 KB.

So, I made the images ~40% smaller on average just by running everything
through a JPEG optimizer.

When you compare that to the ~50% average reduction the author saw for two of
the images, it makes WebP seem even less interesting.

------
jakejarvis
Their stubbornness around WebM is even more frustrating to me, honestly.

------
baybal2
Protip: if you are still hellbent on using huge picture with transparency, you
can use two JPG files one original, and one as an alpha mask.

------
htk
Is this utility comparing to the same resulting quality?

------
recursive
At this point, I don't think it's too fringey a conspiracy theory that Apple
is opposed to the advancement of web technology, while trying to plausibly
appear to be in favor of it. Their motive would be obvious. Keep the native
app experience superior.

~~~
izacus
They're also financially benefiting by pushing competing HEIC and HEVC formats
since they're patent owners and collect royalties for big scale
implementations. In light of that, it's not surprising they refuse to support
royalty free formats.

~~~
ksec
Apple would paid more for HEVC royalty than they receive, or a break even. I
doubt royalty payment is an incentive of any kind to Apple. But much rather
patent protection.

~~~
izacus
I work in video streaming business and I haven't seen anything to support this
(if anything, they were exempt from royalties from their own patent pool), can
you please link something that confirms this?

~~~
ksec
I think for Clarity I need some explaining. I dont have any hard data or fact,
and I doubt anyone would have because of the sensitive nature.

But it is just some Numbers from Facts and Data put into to it and guess work.

If we look into the list of patents from HEVC from three patents pool, along
with those missing such as Technicolor, the list from Apple is comparatively
very tiny. As a matter of fact I would be surprised if they even get 2% from
it given hundreds of companies are in the license pool.

Lets assume Velos Media is in good faith ( FRAND ) and charges similar to
MPEG-LA and HEVC Advance, the total is estimated to be capped at roughly $100M
per Enterprise annually. Despite a huge market increase in volume since H.264
era, the amount of Consumer Electronics _companies_ ( Enterprise ) is actually
not growing. While we are shipping ~1.2B Smartphone every year, ( A market
that doesn't even exist during H.264 invention ) Huawei, Apple, Samsung
represent over 50% of the Smartphone unit volume already. Top 10 vendor
represent close to 90%. Once you factor in Tablet, PC, are in similar
situation and many overlap ( since they are by the same Enterprise and count
towards the cap ). The total addressable market from HEVC patents is at best
$3B from large volume vendor ( $100M Cap x 30 Enterprise ) . You tie in the
loose end from other electronics, Blu Ray disc at $2B per year. You are
looking at a Total of ~$5B.

Ignoring the 2% Apple exempt from their own products and they actually paid
100M annually. $100M is exactly within the 2% they received from ~5B pool.

Generally Speaking in Reality Apple has many cross licensing agreement with
like Samsung, Qualcomm and LG etc they are highly unlikely to be paying
anywhere close to the Cap as they will all be exempt from it. And Apple would
also not be getting anywhere close to 2% mark, but the argument is still the
same.

