Comment by kibwen
3 hours ago
All of this reinforces my point, which is that Mozilla is not simply following marching orders handed down by "the Google overlords".
3 hours ago
All of this reinforces my point, which is that Mozilla is not simply following marching orders handed down by "the Google overlords".
Firefox did not take very long to support AVIF (another recent image format clearly favoured by Google). Please do correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not aware of Mozilla expressing any reluctance over AVIF’s abysmal lossless performance or other shortcomings (some of which have been addressed since), or insisting on using a memory-safe decoder like they have for JPEG XL. Why the stark difference in treatment?
We may not be able to say for certain, but Google’s massive influence is by far the most plausible explanation I can think of. And if the first step in your decision making is looking at what Google is doing, then ‘following marching orders’ is suddenly not such a bad description. (One can argue that with 3 % market share they don’t have much choice, but that’s beside the point.)
Mozilla was a founding member of the Alliance for Open Media, having sponsored Xiph to create Daala, which was later polymerized with Google's VP10 to create AV1. Mozilla has a vested interested in pushing all things related to AV1, including AVIF. That has nothing to do with Google's favor and everything to do with Mozilla's favor. Their hope was to use the existence of AVIF as leverage to give hardware vendors more incentive to provide hardware support for AV1.
[2] was anticipatory obedience from Mozilla. Good for them that they grew a spine later (or more likely: they knew that Google will implement it some time later, so the change of opinion cost them nothing).
This is mental gymnastics. If Mozilla were following Google's orders we would not need to resort to phrases like "anticipatory obedience" to describe a neutral non-position; if they were following Google's orders, they would have simply endorsed it, end of story, and then they would have revoked that endorsement in lockstep with Google as well, which they didn't.