Introducing the ‘mozjpeg’ Project

Re:Introducing the ‘mozjpeg’ Project by wmf on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @04:24PM (#7350048)

From the article: "...replacing JPEG with something better has been a frequent topic of discussion. The major downside to moving away from JPEG is that it would require going through a multi-year period of relatively poor compatibility with the world’s deployed software. We (at Mozilla) don’t doubt that algorithmic improvements will make this worthwhile at some point, possibly soon. Even after a transition begins in earnest though, JPEG will continue to be used widely."

This is Mozilla's roundabout way of saying that they want to put off starting on WebP or JPEG 2000 as long as possible.

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Re:Introducing the ‘mozjpeg’ Project by pornel on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @04:57PM (#7350239)

It's been 4 years already, and there's little adoption. It might take a decade before (if) WebP is as widely deployed and easily usable as JPEG.

According to Google it's about 30% smaller than JPEG: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/webp_study

It's a massive effort to switch entire industry to a new format for a 30% gain. With a drop-in replacement of libjpeg you can get 10% gain right now.

Also WebP is based on 2006 VP8, which is obsolete now. Chrome ships with VP9 that's further 26% smaller on keyframes.

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Re:Introducing the ‘mozjpeg’ Project by pdknsk on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @05:48PM (#7350517)

Not until WebP switches to VP9, which is not planned currently. VP8 does only support 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. Photoshop sets 4:2:0 only on JPEG quality 50 and lower, as comparison.

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Re:Introducing the ‘mozjpeg’ Project by cbhl on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @04:25PM (#7350049)

Only if other browser vendors adopt it, although IIRC WebP has hard-coded maximum file size limits that make it impractical for e.g. retina displays, let alone anything we might see twenty years from now.

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Re:Introducing the ‘mozjpeg’ Project by magicalist on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @04:35PM (#7350115)

Ah, that's interesting. I hadn't heard that before. It is a maximum size of 16383x16383[1], so it's more than practical for retina displays, but I can see the point about files in 20 years (for reference, jpegs can be 4x that in each dimension, 65535×65535).

I haven't heard that brought up as an objection to the format before, though. If it were really a fundamental stumbling block, there are likely ways to adapt the format around it.

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/faq#what_is_the_max...

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Re:Introducing the ‘mozjpeg’ Project by acdha on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @09:37PM (#7351521)

In addition to other concerns people have listed, I found WebP to be extremely slow – at or worse than JPEG 2000, with significantly worse compressed size. If we're going to go to the work of deploying a new image format I'd like at least a clear win versus the status quo, if not better features (JP2's tiled decoding would be perfect for responsive images if you could wave a magic wand to get browser support).

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Re:Introducing the ‘mozjpeg’ Project by d0ugie on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @04:29PM (#7350080)

.. WebP as a replacement to jpegs, pngs, apngs, gifs, and maybe one day svgs and psds, to the moon baby, with or without Mozilla.

Though I'm sure they have their reasons to stay away from an across-the-board superior format. I just wish I knew what they were. Sigh.

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Re:Introducing the ‘mozjpeg’ Project by gcp on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @06:17PM (#7350697)

I just wish I knew what they were. Sigh.

That's not hard: they put out a report months ago concluding that the claimed advantages of WebP were in reality slim to nonexistent, and that it could likely be matched and even outperformed by improved JPEG encoders...which is exactly what they're building now.

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Re:Introducing the ‘mozjpeg’ Project by BrendanEich on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @09:26PM (#7351471)

https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2013/10/17/studying-lossy-...

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