Who cares if there's little adoption? Why not be feature complete? It's not like Google is some cash-strapped startup.
Heck, macOS ships with terminal definitions so you can log into a Mac using a Commodore B-128 as a serial terminal. That's certainly going to have less adoption than JPEG XL.
On GitHub if you rename your WebP file to "file.webp.png" it will upload just fine, and will use the correct Content-Type header when serving. It's really frustrating a simple \.(png|gif|jpe?g)$ check is preventing the uploading of these files. I found this is actually the case for a number of platforms.
Why is Adobe so bad at their job? GIMP added webp support about 5 years ago. Paint.NET added it 4 years ago.
> many websites still don't support uploading webp files.
4chan is the only such site I've heard of, and 4chan is notoriously bad at this sort of thing ever since they lost moot. It took them years to permit uploading of vp9/opus webms, for no good reason. 4chan's present administrators are incompetent, but 4chan is barely profitable (if at all) so that's not really unexpected.
But Adobe rakes in huge piles of cash, so what is Adobe's excuse?
Did they finally do that? I left permanently a couple years ago (after being there regularly since 2006) because the small "these kinds of threads are why I still hang around this place" threads got more and more infrequent and the regular users got more and more annoying and less fun. Most of the site just became a constant pool of angry racism, cynicism, and paranoia. I can handle seeing stupid racism, but the death of fun and the constant angry sarcasm just got old.
Anyway, I was constantly annoyed that I couldn't upload vp9 webms, and that apng was also not supported given how much better than gif it was. Webp would have been decent, too.
Because this code will be exposed on every single webpage you load, and historically these kind of parsers have had a number of security problems.
Something something memory safety, but this is the situation that currently exists.
"All the image parsers" would be a very bad idea. Years ago there was a bug in some Linux setups where all gstreamer codecs were exposed in Firefox, and it was a huge problem (similar: https://lwn.net/Articles/708196/ – although the one I remember is much older, around 2010 or so).
It's not really comparable to all the old terminfo entries from decades ago: the vendor controls those terminfo entries, not $random_websites. Maybe the ncurses terminfo parser actually does have some buffer overflow (there's an entire mini-programming language in there), but if it does it's not really a huge acute problem.
By that logic, Chrome shouldn't ever add any new features. WebP is also an additional attack surface.
This is one of those things that sound nice, but there's a lot of practical caveats, and in reality it would all be pretty complex. Who would provide the "trusted certs"? How do you decide between a "good and safe plugin" and "not so good and unsafe plugin"? How do you update these decoders? etc.
That world existed, in the 90s and early 2000s, and it was called "ActiveX". The codebase= attribute of the <object> element exists for that use case. It sucked, for two major reasons: first of all, it was a reliable way to get malware into user's machines (being "signed with a trusted cert" doesn't help when all you need for a trusted cert is money and/or hacking a trusted software publisher). Second, it was very Windows-specific, and a significant obstacle to the adoption of alternative operating systems, hardware architectures, and browsers.
If that's the case (and if the implementation is sufficient, rather than a leaky prototype) it would seem that the burden is quite low.
Behaving like there's no cost in such maintenance is just whack.
Compile it to wasm and run it in a sandbox? Or throw some rust groupies at it?
> Once released, it's pretty much impossible to rollback support for media formats on the web.
We must live in a time where flash still dominates short web animations, streaming providers use silver light and every enterprise user is stuck waiting for the companies 5GB Java applet to load right when IE6 suddenly pops up to kill everything with an ActiveX based Windows update that adds more video codecs instead of removing them from the system. The list goes on forever. Browsers are not above killing features and breaking things for security reasons or if they just feel like it.
Also webp is 13 years old now or something since the initial release as compared with jpegxl which is quite new.
If after a decade no one really uses it, fine remove it - no one will care if it’s unused. But to kill it in its cradle is just BS. JPEGXL should have the same opportunities WebP had.
I think the problem here is that W3C is lagging on listing which image formats are standard and vendors are shipping their own in-house tech in the vaccuum (and that W3C is composed of browser vendors means Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozila & whoever is there from the community can't agree).