Comment by weberer

10 hours ago

>JPEG-XL is not particularly patent-laden and its license is correct for the use-case.

The same could be said for .webm, but Apple refused to support it because they wanted to patent-laden alternative to thrive.

> Apple refused to support it because they wanted to patent-laden alternative to thrive.

Where do people get this stuff?

Apple finally supported WebP in 2020, 10 years after it was released by Google. Firefox added WebP support in 2019, a year before Safari. Was Mozilla also part of conspiracy to undermine WebP? Come on now.

Seems to me neither Apple or Mozilla wanted to be forced to support a format they had no say in developing. Usually there's a process for coming to consensus on standards.

WebP is ubiquitous now, not the case in 2010 when it was released.

It had advantages compared to JPEG, but not enough at the time to justify changing workflows, etc. WebP initially had better compression than JPEG, but as encoders/decoders improved (MozJPEG, Jpegli, turbo-libjpeg, Guetzli) the lead WebP had mostly went away regarding compression and visual fidelity.

Going forward, WebP is becoming less relevant by the day; it doesn't support wide gamut color; it only supports RGB. It's max pixel count is quite limited compared to AVIF and JPEG XL. Newer formats have use cases beyond the web; WebP doesn't.