“Implement WebP image support” – Reported 8 years ago | Hacker News Reader

“Implement WebP image support” – Reported 8 years ago

bugzilla.mozilla.org

38 pointsxvilka24 comments

WebP never caught on outside of Google's stack:

When Facebook tried to use WebP a while back their users didn't like it:

https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-tries-googles-webp-image-...

But these days if you really want to use WebP you can use a WebAssembly build of the library to support it in browsers which don't support it natively:

https://webmproject.github.io/libwebp-demo/webp_wasm/index.h...

Interesting use case for WASM. That really opens the door for more experimental image formats.

> When Facebook tried to use WebP a while back their users didn't like it

That's just a "Google sucks at UX" issue. Apple recently adopted HEIF in iOS wholesale, but nobody is complaining because they made the correct UX call to convert to JPEG as soon as there's the slightest chance the recipient doesn't support the format.

(not directly related to the topic)

Firefox (on Mac) lacks three things which I hope they fix them ASAP:

1. Compared to Chrome, FF just makes the Mac insanely hot. Sometimes if a website is stuck at loading, the CPU usage goes seriously high, resulting in temperatures around 80˚ Celsius, and MBP fan rounds at ~5000 rpm.

2. FF doesn't support page scrolling with keyboard shortcuts like Chrome does. On a Mac, you can [big] scroll up/down using alt + arrow keys. "Home" and "End" could also be achieved by Command + arrow keys. On FF however, I haven't found the same shortcuts.

Update: It has a weak form of this feature (but still requires your MBP to have "Home" and "End" buttons on it!): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...

3. FF used to be faster than Chrome at startup, but now on FF 57-58, when you type in the omni-bar, it takes quite a long time for FF to figure out where it has seen this before. In other words, it can't quickly tab-complete what you're typing among bookmarks, history, etc.

I switched from Chrome to FF a while ago, mostly because of the Quantum and the new slick modern UI. But due to these annoying problems, I switched back to Chrome.

On #2, Fn-up and Fn-down are respectively equivalent to page up and page down on the Mac (at an OS level).

Yes, in the "Update" section I addressed that. But still Home and End aren't available.

Edit: The comment below mentions another way to achieve Home/End features in FF.

Are they not? I use Cmd+Up and Cmd+Down to scroll to the top and bottom of a page, respectively, on Firefox.

Also fn-Left and fn-Right

You're right, I just used them and it works. Weird how Mozilla didn't mention it on the link I provided.

They do, but it might be confusing because they list "Home" and "End" first, before the Cmd+Up/Down alternatives.

Agreed. Quantum is still very slow on macOS. My least favorite part is the "whoosh to catch up" highlights following the mouse cursor in about:config on my mid-2015 MacBook Pro.

Quantum is causing me huge problems on Windows 10 machines too, periodically just freezes my machines and tabs just stop working with no errors reported. I was very enthusiastic when Quantum was first released, it seemed like an awesome new FF but not happening, gonna have to ditch it.

They destroyed the XPI/XUL platform and thousands of hours of work that went into those extensions. Now Firefox is a much worse version of Chrome, no reason to use it except for dubious ideology preferring Mozilla. Sacrificing the one network effect that kept Firefox relevant was a brilliant move.

You can also scroll up and down just by pressing Space (down) and Shift Space (up) in many Mac applications, particularly browsers and RSS readers

I honestly can't live without a home and end keys.

Maybe we'll have better luck with the AV1-based alternative [1] that a coalition (i.e., not Google acting unilaterally) is currently designing.

[1]: (warning, autoplaying video) https://www.cnet.com/news/google-mozilla-av1-photo-format-co...

Nice. Hopefully the av1 photo format supports transparency.

JPEG XR always seemed like a better contender to me (I mean WebP launched without alpha channel support. How tone-deaf to developer/designer needs is that?). But it had Microsoft's name on it so it was doomed from the start.

At this point it seems like we might as well wait for the eventual "HEIF for AV1" to get the best bang-for-the-buck implementation if we're going to have to support this format in perpetuity.

WebP does give better image compression in our experience: https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-very-webp-new-year-from-cloudf...

Also it isn't in Safari and neither is apples new image format.

It happens quite a lot, in general, that some bugs simply don't get the kind of attention they deserve. For example, non-Firefox browsers supported relative positioning of table cells in 2000 or so, which is useful for interactive table rearrangement, and Firefox held fast to not supporting it, citing complications around backgrounds [1], even causing the standard to temporarily change (which they then cite in the bug). List-style-position is still broken [2]. There are plenty more, in all the browsers.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35168 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36854

I would rather they did something about the Scrollbar in firefox, after all that is a thing people have wanted for 17 years

Holy shit, WebP itself is that old already…

Opened bug also in Servo, since it is essentially a future of the Firefox https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/20045

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