Ask HN: Why did Apple decide to go with HEIC?

1 point·forgot-my-pw··2 comments

There's currently no wide support for it, even Safari cannot open it: https://caniuse.com/#search=heif

HEVC adoption is still pretty low too: https://caniuse.com/#feat=hevc

Lack of support in Safari feels like it must be deliberate - I can't believe they just forgot to do this. I wonder if heif/heic is currently to be considered a 'private variable', and that the 'public getImage()' type method that we use returns as a jpg, regardless of how it's stored internally.

It's somewhat difficult to actually get the raw HEIC file, so from a users point of view this is more of an implementation detail.

I wonder if this is partially in response to how webp started out, e.g. this thread about Facebook's implementation: https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/?fromgroup... - you can see there a user saying:

"As of yesterday, I've been able to download funny pictures from facebook from friends in correct formats, but now they are downloading as an additional extension of .webp??? How do I fix this? It states that I'm downloading a .jpg, but it keeps coming up with "Save file as .webp" I"ve tried scrolling down and click on all files to save it as, but then the picture will not show up. Help???? "

So, it seems Apple are keeping this internal to the OS to avoid this sort of problem.

Apple was one of the first adopters of (standard) MPEG-4 and MP4 and IMO that paid off. Clearly they're not afraid of being an early adopter of HEVC either. Once they went all-in on HEVC then HEIF becomes a no-brainer, although maybe they see it only as an authoring format not as a delivery format.

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