Re:RIP Google Music
by least on Thursday November 12, 2020 @03:27AM
(#25067711)
...Except, isn't that exactly the point of having competing browsers? WebP was pushed heavily by Google and because google has such a massive market share, it became a 'standard.' Google has been leveraging its position as the dominant market leader in the browser market to push its technologies and forcing competing browsers to support it or receive reduced functionality. It's the same story for 4k video on youtube.
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WebP simply offers more effective compression than the ages-old jpeg. That's it. Apple has its own HEIC as a competing format, but that didn't really take off.
...which one might attribute to the fact that it's not supported on chrome, the vastly more popular web browser. I really don't see how you can argue that Safari is the new IE6 when it is slow to adopt standards that Google just decided are now web standards.
A healthy ecosystem should allow for innovations to take place from Apple, Google, and Mozilla and look at what sticks. As it stands now, Mozilla and Apple occasionally make new contributions to web standards but anything that chrome pushes effectively becomes one without any input from another company and that's kind of problematic.
WebP is Google, but HEIC is not Apple, it's an actual standard: ISO/IEC 23008-12 (MPEG-H). Apple just adopted it.
So it's Chrome that doesn't implement a standard, and Safari that doesn't implement an ad-hoc competitor technology.
Isn't HEVC, and by extension HEIC, a patent minefield, like everything that comes out of MPEG? And also webp came out before HEVC was finalized iirc.
I share your opinion of Safari, but I think something better than webp is coming next year, and Google is one of its backers: JPEG XL: https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_im...