Firefox 77 Nightly Adds Initial AV1 Image File Support (AVIF)

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox 77 Nightly Adds Initial AV1 Image File Support (AVIF)

Exciting times in Mozilla land as in addition to the recent Wayland improvements along with Flatpak availability and WebGPU support coming together, the newest Firefox Nightly builds now have AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-77-AVIF-Experimental

[birdie]

I wonder why it took them years to add webp support and now they are almost rushing with AV1F support.

[RahulSundaram]

I wonder why it took them years to add webp support and now they are almost rushing with AV1F support.

WebP didn't represent a significant improvement over the status quo

https://web.archive.org/web/20150319...x/archives/541
https://research.mozilla.org/2014/07...h-mozjpeg-2-0/

[You-]

I wonder why it took them years to add webp support and now they are almost rushing with AV1F support.

AFAIK They had an approximately 2 year period where they did a lot of backend refactoring and cleanups (often rust/servo related) with little to no new features being added. Since that period ended, the codebase is in a better shape and they can start adding features more easily.

[ernstp]

Firefox now also has audioworklet support I noticed, been holding back MS Teams A/V conferencing in Firefox among other things I think.

[birdie]

WebP didn't represent a significant improvement over the status quo

https://web.archive.org/web/20150319...x/archives/541
https://research.mozilla.org/2014/07...h-mozjpeg-2-0/

These are extremely old posts and in my own experience WebP is miles better than JPEG at the same visual quality. I've managed to compress my JPEG files (Quality: 96) to 99.9% similarly looking WebP's which are 40% from their JPEG originals. Quite major savings I'd say.

Also, for some reasons Google uses WebP extensively across all its products and now I see not only Google but Facebook/Instagram/Netflix as well. All major players who care about quality and bandwidth. No, there must be a different explanation.

The patch to add WebP support was created nine (!) years ago and it's not like it adds too much code or makes Firefox more insecure. No, it looks like the decision to delay it for so long was purely political rather than practical. This bug report has literally many dozens of people begging Mozilla to do it faster.

Another BIG feature of WebP is that it allows to make decently looking desktop images, vs. JPEG which turns text into a blurry mess or PNG which inflates images.

And the request to add MHTML support was created 20 years (!) ago. And there are no alternatives to this format at all.

[Danny3]

Finally something useful for the user.
In my opinion after the HTML5 features, they should work on improving the picture, video and audio support.
I was getting really tired with their VR nonsense.

[skeevy420]

These are extremely old posts and in my own experience WebP is miles better than JPEG at the same visual quality. I've managed to compress my JPEG files (Quality: 96) to 99.9% similarly looking WebP's which are 40% from their JPEG originals. Quite major savings I'd say.

Also, for some reasons Google uses WebP extensively across all its products and now I see not only Google but Facebook/Instagram/Netflix as well. All major players who care about quality and bandwidth. No, there must be a different explanation.

The patch to add WebP support was created nine (!) years ago and it's not like it adds too much code or makes Firefox more insecure. No, it looks like the decision to delay it for so long was purely political rather than practical. This bug report has literally many dozens of people begging Mozilla to do it faster.

Another BIG feature of WebP is that it allows to make decently looking desktop images, vs. JPEG which turns text into a blurry mess or PNG which inflates images.

Google has the money to pay others off so they pick the Google image format?

[birdie]

Google has the money to pay others off so they pick the Google image format?

When did you escape from the loony bin? It's a 100% open standard used by hundreds of companies who want to save bandwidth while preserving the image quality.

[RahulSundaram]

Google has the money to pay others off so they pick the Google image format?

It is more that Google maintains Chrome/Chromium which has by far the most dominant share in the browser market. Edge didn't implement WebP support either till they moved over to the Chromium codebase. Safari didn't implement it for all this time either