Comment by HardyLeung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HardyLeung | Hacker News Reader

I find that Jeff Muizelaar's argument (not Arstechnica but what they talked about) very weak. He said WebP is not good because:

* Jpeg has some fancy features not seen in WebP (4:4:4 YCrCb, CMYK support, etc)

* Jpeg's compression is "good enough", and nobody cares about diskspace (cited Facebook 85%, Flickr 96% quality level)

* If WebP, why not Jpeg XR?

* WebP has no alpha channel support!

* There are "low hanging fruit" in Jpeg optimization such as progressive encoding.

Each of these points in isolation may be valid, but together they give me the feeling that he was arguing surgically. He said Jpeg is already very good, Jpeg is actually bad but there are low hanging fruit to improve it, and whether Jpeg is good or bad doesn't matter because nobody cares.

Personally I feel the "75% is already very good" argument to be the weakness. Facebook pictures are very poor compared to the original, and if diskspace is not a problem they would have increased it to 96% like Flickr.

I hope Mozilla supports the format and let the users decide.

One possible reason to push for improvements before accepting the new format into Firefox is suggested by Justin Lebar in a comment on http://bugzil.la/600919:

"In general, Mozilla should use its weight to improve the web in the long term, even if doing so is unpopular in the short term. In this case, by not accepting WebP in its current form, we're putting pressure on its developers to improve it in the ways that we think are important. Once we accept the codec, we lose this leverage. [...] Remember that even if we landed this patch tomorrow, it would still likely be years before this format saw wide adoption. The argument is that it's better to wait and throw our weight behind something we think moves the web forward, if and when that arrives."

Google has yet to demonstrate that WebP produces better image quality at the same or smaller file size than what's possible with JPEG. Until Google can kill it on that test, nothing else really matters because the format has no features above and beyond JPEG and none on the roadmap. That means all WebP has going for it is the quality size argument and that's yet to be proved.

Google has shown a lot of images that are smaller file sizes and look clearly worse to even the untrained eye. Show me same quality at a smaller size or better quality at the same size and then WebP can claim it's got something going for it. That hasn't happened yet so it's a negative when stacked up against JPEG and most of the current JPEG alternatives.

I'd like to respond to your criticism of my argument but I'm having trouble understanding it.

As for my point about Facebook, I believe that they do care about the size of the images. However, the fact that they can be trivially and losslessly reduced in size suggests they just don't care enough to invest in optimizing them. Presumably, they have more important things to be working on. This suggests that they might also have more important things to work on than switching to webp.

My apology for not being clear. The five points are summary of what you said and I hope there is no confusion.

Right after the five points, I object to your "surgical arguments" which is along the line of "Jpeg is not too bad, and even if it is bad, there are ways to fix them". The truth is that Jpeg is actually a very poor format. Image artifact is very poor at low quality, and compression is very poor at high quality. While I don't know for sure whether WebP is really that much better at high quality (my limited experience showed that it is), I disagree with your arguments that there is "nothing wrong or unfixable about Jpeg". Our eyes are accustomed to poor web Jpeg quality but I think if something better comes along people will see it.

Also, given Opera and Chrome already support WebP, if Mozilla throws its weight behind it, I think Safari and IE will oblige in short order. The browser landscape is very different from the days of early PNG, and adoption will be quick. Just look at how quickly Microsoft transforms into the "#1" advocate of HTML5.

My position isn't that there's "nothing wrong or unfixable about Jpeg" at all. There's lots wrong and fixable with JPEG. My problem with WebP is that it currently doesn't fix enough of the problems that JPEG has and that if we adopt it right now we might end up with another format that still has problems and will have to replace WebP with yet another format that fixes those problems later. JPEG took 6 years to standardize and has lasted for nearly 20, this suggests that we might not want to rush to commit to a 8 month old image format with a bitstream that was frozen the moment it became public.

As for support in other browsers, WebM is supported by Opera, Chrome and Firefox, plus it solves problem of being a royalty-free modern video codec and neither Safari nor IE have obliged in short order. What do you think that WebP brings that will make adoption happen faster than WebM?

I think let's just agree that Jpeg has a lot of problems and we'd like to seek the best replacement. Obviously high-compression rate is important or else everything should migrate to PNG, but the current Jpeg tradeoff between quality and size is not just not very good. Also interestingly, there seems to be a very wide spectrum of Jpeg lib quality from decent to very bad, and I found out about that while experimenting with WebP.

WebP is different from WebM in that there are IP issues. I think WebP is more like SVG/Canvas in that vendors don't see any "hurt" in supporting them once there is enough momentum behind. Of course, your point about making sure that we don't want to support any half-baked image format. I think WebP is beyond half-baked, and an initial pledge of experimental support -- instead of an outright rejection which seems to be tone -- doesn't hurt.

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