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Comment by clusmore | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, Google's is 4.5MB whereas Apple's is 55MB. For comparison, the 1 minute YouTube video[1] in 1080p is only 11MB.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC9urbiVp4M

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Apple's page also features way more animations which are more extensive and complex than a total of may be three on Google's page? And also seamlessly flow into each other.

Apple should be using WebP on their page. It'll reduce the page size quite a bit.

Safari doesn't support WebP.

That's insane!

What, Apple not sucking up to whatever new format Google wants to shove into the web?

Apple not supporting formats which are available in the wild. They don't have to promote it or advertise it in any way. But not being able to play webp at this point is kind of silly if the alternatives are worse.

Also, Chrome does support AAC which was popularised by Apple pushing it onto iPhones.

Safari's list of supported video formats is pitiful.

> Safari on iOS supports low-complexity AAC audio, MP3 audio, AIF audio, WAVE audio, and baseline profile MPEG-4 video. Safari on the desktop (Mac OS X and Windows) supports all media supported by the installed version of QuickTime, including any installed third-party codecs. [0]

Despite that probably being written many, many years ago, it's pretty accurate from what I can tell.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Au...

That’s not strictly true. You can use Apple’s preferred alternative to WebP, HEIF: https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/03/17/heif-image-container...

And eventually AVIF: https://twitter.com/mathias/status/1248135249663574017 & https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207750

But if it's a better experience for customers, why not?

It’s not. WebP doesn’t have hardware decoders, which means that it’s going to be hell on batteries.

Out of interest, do most systems have hardware decodes for JPEG + PNG?

I do agree, but do serve webp when I can to save bandwidth. Webp has been around over 10 years now, so it's not exactly new.

As a somewhat interesting aside, Apple don't even support their own HEIC in Safari, so maybe they just don't have a team working on this area of Safari!

WebP has been around for 10 years, but Chrome didn't even support it for the first four, according to Can I Use.

Apple doesn't want to expose itself to the still somewhat murky situation around patents which might or might not be covering WebP (which is basically a still frame encoded in VP9).

Aside of the potential risk of a lawsuit, what makes this worse is that as a partner of the MPEG-LA, they might even be in the position of compromising the MPEG patent pool itself.

Photoshop doesn't support webp, barely anything supports webp.

Although I'm not trying to defend Safari but webp is not a widely used format and absolutely shouldn't be being pushed at this point until I can save an image from a site and actually be able to use it in applications.

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