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Comment by whyever | Hacker News Reader

> I mean, webp was made by Google and we know how many of their heavily promoted creations are dead already...

I don't understand this argument. WebP is an algorithm, not a service. You cannot kill it once it's published.

JPEG XL is similarly an algorithm that's been published, but Google removed it from their browser and Mozilla followed suit, which effectively killed its usefulness as a web-friendly (and, more generally, usable-anywhere) format.

Some nuance there — it's not dead yet: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064

Thanks, do you know the status of said safe decoder?

I do not, sorry.

> the reference decoder, which weighs in at more than 100,000 lines of multithreaded C++.

Wow! I have never written a compression codec implementation, but that's kind of staggering.

Fair enough. What I meant by this is that, in the end, most software that decides to add webp support is doing it because of the huge push by Google to do so. But if they suddenly change that push to something else then webp might find itself growing more irrelevant.

I didn't know webp was pushed by Google. They should publicize that fact more so people know to avoid the format entirely.

What Google pushes is in their self interest and has nothing to do with the good of the unwashed masses.

WebP is basically a single i-frame from the WebM video codec, which literally was developed by Google to avoid paying license cost for H.264. For which they had great incentive.

WebP is to WebM what HEIC is to HEVC.

You can argue that using free codecs is a collateral benefit here, even though Google did it for selfish reasons. It is not detrimental to the public or the internet.

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