

WebP – faster decoding and rolls out across Google properties - rayshan
http://blog.chromium.org/2014/03/webp-improves-while-rolling-out-across.html

======
dudus
These are impressive numbers. Are there technical reason why IE or Firefox
haven't adopted it yet? Or just political ones?

[http://caniuse.com/webp](http://caniuse.com/webp)

~~~
rakoo
Pointers to Mozilla decisions:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600919](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600919)

[http://muizelaar.blogspot.fr/2011/04/webp.html](http://muizelaar.blogspot.fr/2011/04/webp.html)

TL;DR: webp wasn't better-than-jpeg enough at the time it was considered, with
even some rejection off the published Google studies. I feel like they thought
it was still too experimental (although I haven't followed the process so I
may be wrong).

~~~
joshmoz
The Mozilla WebP bugs are a mess due to loads of poor comments. Read at your
own risk. The bug you cite has been superseded by a new bug with the same poor
quality of comments.

I recently posted a more detailed summary of my own views on the second bug:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=856375#c174](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=856375#c174)

~~~
skal65535
Since the bug is closed and we can no longer reply, i'll drop brief comments
here:

1) We lack data showing that WebP is significantly enough better than JPEG in
terms of compression. [...]

If we omit Google numbers (that this blog post and the ones before reported),
Facebook reported 20% saving as a starting point for mobile
([http://internet.org/efficiencypaper](http://internet.org/efficiencypaper)).
the Mozilla bug has good number reported (Netflix, Akamai and other CDNs,
etc...) inbetween the noise.

2) Last time I checked, it was not possible to create large WebP images. I
couldn't encode a ~20 megapixel image.

This was fixed in libwebp0.4.0. (but i hope no web site is going to send me a
20megapixel image while i'm on my phone)

3) I suspect it's unlikely that MS will agree to include WebP support in IE,
maybe ever. Not having MS on board, given their market share, is problematic.
It means lots more header/UA checks and double solutions for every use of
WebP, possibly for a long time.

UA detection are here to stay for quite some time anyway, before all current
browser versions are retired (if that ever happens). Responsive web put the
load on server logic, then.

4) I haven't done extensive testing on this yet, but word is that WebP
compression advantages fall off when an image gets larger than about 500x500
pixels. This might be why we see WebP perform a bit worse on the Tecnick image
set (~1200x1200) than the Kodak set (~768x512) in my last study. This may also
be impacting other peoples' tests. I'm curious to know more about this.

VP8 uses 4x4 transform, not 8x8. That's the main difference with jpeg that
limit the efficiency at high dimensions. Although 500x500 seems a bit low.
Let's also note that your study was also using a downsampling version of the
SSIM metric, which could be interacting favorably with jpeg's larger transform
block.

5) Users can't do much with WebP images today if they save them. As Facebook
learned, this frustrates users. As this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem
it's less important, but it is a consideration.

That was mostly an app problem. Android faces the same problem with the data
proxy mentioned in the blog, but this is taken care of client-side.

skal

------
lnanek2
> The latest Chrome browsers for Android and iOS can significantly reduce
> cellular data usage by using proxy servers hosted at Google to optimize
> website content

Ah, I was wondering why Chrome on my Android was so broken lately. I checked
"Request desktop" like usual and refreshed and just couldn't get a broken page
to give me the working desktop version at all. That always used to work.
Eventually I had to switch to the Dolphin browser, change my user agent,
uninstall Dolphin Jetpack which was similarly broken, and finally I got the
working desktop version of the page...

~~~
mdwrigh2
None of your response indicates that the proxy is the issue here.

------
hendry
If you have the bright idea of converting your JPEG images with precious EXIF
metadata, beware you might not be able to get it back out.
[https://code.google.com/p/webp/issues/detail?id=176](https://code.google.com/p/webp/issues/detail?id=176)

------
ksec
On another notes, doesn't the H.265 has a image spec as well. How is that
getting on?

