Comment by alwillis
15 hours ago
> 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.
> it doesn't support wide gamut color
That's wrong, you declare this with an ICC profile, done.
Lossy WebP has an important limitation in being YUV 4:2:0. And it's strictly 8-bit. That is the actual reason it doesn't replace JPEG, which is rarely even implemented to a greater extent.
Lossless WebP replaces GIF. Despite much better compression, it doesn't replace PNG, which supports 16 bits, and has stronger metadata support.