
Mozilla apparently implementing WebP support for Firefox - d0ugie
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1294490
======
mtgx
Interesting. I would've thought they wouldn't support it anymore, considering
there's an even smaller chance that Apple and Microsoft would support it, too.
I was thinking that maybe they're waiting on the NETVC/Daala/Thor/VP10 video
codec standardization by the IETF, which would then be followed by a new
standard for images on the web based on the same technology. But I guess
they're going with webp for now. I wonder why they finally decided to support
webp.

~~~
niftich
I mean this in the best possible way, but Mozilla -- more often that not --
tends to go along with Google's direction with regard to web platform APIs,
supported file formats, etc.

In my recollection, their most high-profile disagreement was over WebSQL vs
IndexedDB, where IndexedDB was championed by Mozilla with fervor I have rarely
seen -- or rather, Mozilla straight-up declared they would never support
WebSQL -- and in the end IndexedDB actually won out.

There seems to be a general mutual reciprocity [1] between the Chrome and
Firefox teams, although in a mercantilist sense of Chrome introducing all
sorts of stuff all the time, and Firefox implements them also within a few
versions.

[1]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_t...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_type=substring&query_format=advanced&status_whiteboard=parity-
Chrome)

~~~
Sylos
Can't really expect much else with the market share that Google has. They can
implement anything they want, and it's halfway there to being a web standard.
If Mozilla doesn't follow suit, they risk losing even more users, because
webpage developers might just ignore Firefox or give it a worse fallback
solution.

------
shakethemonkey
Importantly, the webp format supports animation, and is considerably more
efficient than animated gif. [1]

[1]
[http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/fl_awebp/cell_an...](http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/fl_awebp/cell_animation.webp)

~~~
bzbarsky
Yes, but is it as efficient as WebM?

The concept of creating animated images out of the index frame format of a
video codec is pretty amusing to me. Just use the video codec if you want
video.

~~~
shakethemonkey
This becomes a complicated discussion. In an img tag, a webp can degrade to
gif, but that is not true of webm, which is not an image. And webp uses
considerably less resources than webm.

It's probably also an easier sell to the more problematic browsers (you know
who they are) to support webp than webm.

~~~
bzbarsky
By degrade in an img tag you mean if the server does sniffing or content
negotiation to send gif instead of webp?

> It's probably also an easier sell to the more problematic browsers

The only browser I can think of that does not support webm already but might
conceivably add support for webp is Safari. Chrome, Firefox and Edge all
support webm, and I don't see IE or Opera Mini adding webp support, since
neither one is really in active development.

Maybe you're right that Safari is more likely to support webp than webm. It's
hard to say.

~~~
j4_james
FWIW, you can do content negotiation on the client side with the HTML5 picture
element:

[http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/responsive/picture-
el...](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/responsive/picture-element/#toc-
file-type)

If a browser doesn't support that, it's probably not going to support the
image format you're trying to negotiate anyway. In that case it's just going
to fall back to the enclosed default img which is exactly what you'd want.

