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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

That's too bad. WebP was a bad idea released several years too early, now it's stuck with VP8 and the only color format is 8-bit 4:2:0 which is just not good enough. Please don't use it.

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It's better than JPEG and PNG for most uses, with smaller image sizes. Even 4:2:0 is better than the sRGB usually used in PNG. I'd rather have this now than wait another few years for a few niche usecases (where TIFF can still be used)

You can use AV1 or HEIF right now, and they're actually modern formats.

> Even 4:2:0 is better than the sRGB usually used in PNG.

Better for what? Not for wide-color photographs or any kind of colored text, that's for sure.

Afaik there is no av1 or heif browser implementations. Theres far less efficient polyfills for heif that are poor on large images.

HEIF works in Safari, and I believe Android will have it soon if it doesn't already. As for AV1, browsers can add it anytime they want…

Looking at CanIUse [1][2], it seems like the HEIF support is in macOS itself, and not the Safari browser. I wouldn't be surprised if the Windows version of Safari didn't support it.

[1] https://caniuse.com/#feat=heif

[2] https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse/issues/3767

Safari for Windows has been discontinued a few years back.

Chrome 70 Canary and Firefox Nightly support AV1. YouTube has a test channel with AV1 encoded videos.

https://9to5google.com/2018/09/14/youtube-av1-video-beta-chr...

That is very, very new, and afaik it uses the poorly performing reference Implimentation.

JPEG can do 4:4:4. And so can PNG.

Every format looks like a bad idea released too early when you're looking 8 years back at it. At least lossless WebP is better than PNG. Is there something better by now? Yeah, but 8 years from now when everything actually supports and uses it you'll have the same thoughts.

There is something better by now, so why add it now?

I actually don't think this about other formats - for instance MP3 is 25 years old and I think it's just fine to support it. It's patent free and its quality limit is all you need for many applications.

This isn't true for VP8, our eyes are just harder to please. (And On2 was never the best codec developer…)

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