Maybe we can slow down development a little bit and actually design a format that will last for another 30 years instead of requiring browsers to support yet another hot new format every five years.
JPEG XL is the next format that I am sure will take over:<p><a href="https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_image_codecs" rel="nofollow">https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_im...</a><p>It's virtually lossless and progressive.<p>After 400 re-saves it's visually unchanged: <a href="https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1327302393776758784" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1327302393776758784</a>
[one of WebP2 author here]<p>This 'new' WebP format is not radically different, but just pushes the same use-cases further
(The web. Not archival. Not camera capture.), sticking to simplicity and usefulness.<p>10 years is a long time since WebP-v1, and techno has evolved since. We can go much lower in bitrate for still-good-enough quality, and that's what we're interested in exploring.<p>AVIF was designed starting from a video codec, similar to WebP-v1 in the early stages, and this has some drawbacks (that later we needed to correct in WebP, that was confusing).
WebP2 is aiming at images-on-the-web right away, and not as an afterthought.<p>More details about the last 10 years of WebP and some WebP2 features: <a href="http://shorturl.at/BEMV8" rel="nofollow">http://shorturl.at/BEMV8</a>
The responses in this thread are disappointing. The idea of chastising a person or organization for iterating or creating a new format is something that I can’t agree with<p>Maybe this will be a future popular format. Maybe it'll die on the vine. Who knows, but experimentation and alternate approaches, particularly when the code is being shared is always a good thing, regardless of how you feel about Google or Chrome
I thought the issue leading to this was AVIF decoding complexity but the goal of this project is apparently roughly parity with AVIF decoding performance. Is encoding performance of still images such a big deal?<p>I thought these problems were largely solved if they just gave implementations time to mature. Unless we’re talking wildly different concepts here.
And only 10bit HDR support? Weak. Though I guess PQ has been patented by Dolby?<p><a href="https://www.avsforum.com/threads/smpte-webinar-dolby-vision-pq-eotf.1533447/" rel="nofollow">https://www.avsforum.com/threads/smpte-webinar-dolby-vision-...</a>
"The aim is to be around 30% better than the original WebP design but is looking about 20% worse than AVIF"<p>Why isn't WebP2 what WebP was? WebP was basically just a portion of the VP8 codec.<p>So why isn't WebP2 the same thing but for AV1? Why is WebP2 not just AVIF?
Browsers aren't required to do anything. Do you remember getting PNG transparency to work in IE6?<p>Progressively enhance the images you decide have enough business value to do so. Where I work we never replaced GIFs with APNGs, but we _did_ replace them with MP4s.
I've come across WebP images a few times in the past whenever I've needed to download images for marketing material, etc.<p>It's usually impossible to: import those images anywhere, modify them, or basically do anything with them (even open them outside Chrome).<p>As a consequence I've had to install another browser to ensure the images were not WebP.<p>Was that the intended purpose?
History of replacing JPEG with something better<p>- PNG Mostly to replace CompueServeGIF (Not to be mistaken for Yiff files). Neat but no real gain over JPEG in quality on photos so nonone really used it for anythign but animations, but everyone were already used to GIF in their workflow so.. meh...<p>- JPEG2000 1997-2000 embroiled in patent nonsense so noone really uses it in the wild.<p>- WebP: used by google to look cool but since most people used a webbrowser that does not support it at launch servers were forced to have JPEG's as fallback. Great savings much wow.<p>- HEIF: Absolute cluster fudge of variations then Apple did a big Dick move and said "Orchard says HEIC, or Bust!" without actually telling anyone and broke several people's workflows that depended on JPEGS form iPhones, especially since FCPX did not support HEIC on launch and it took another 6 months for that update to come. Yay.<p>- WebP2; Google want to swing big dick dev powers to gain a marginal possible performance savings on their servers and say's "WebP? That is sooo 2015! you gotta be on WebP2 to hang with us"<p>Is it really that surprising that most people who depend on workflows to actually work to make their money are still using JPEG, GIF and TIFF files?