After six years, Firefox finally gets WebP support

Aug 25, 2016 13:10 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla engineers have started procedures to add support for WebP, a lossy and lossless image compression format developed by Google.

The WebP image format is derivated from the VP8 video format and is considered the sister project of the WebM multimedia format, an evolution of VP8.

Google acquired the technology in 2010 when it bought On2 Technologies, a company based in New York that created VP8.

WebP considered better than JPEG, PNG, and GIF

WebP supports transparency, XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) metadata, ICC (International Color Consortium) profiles, and Google also announced support for animation frames.

Early tests have shown that WebP can cut down PNG size by as much as 45 percent, and (animated) GIF size with 65 percent.

From its beginning, the image format was supported by the Google Chrome, Opera, and Pale Moon browsers.

Google started adding WebP support to its services, such as Google Search, Google Play, Picasa, and Gmail, using fallbacks to JPEG, PNG, and GIF files in case the user's browser didn't support the new image format.

Other services like Telegram also support it. Apple also added WebP support to macOS Sierra and iOS 10. Most image graphics editors support WebP, either natively or via plugins (Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.NET).

Early support added, but currently unusable

In a Bugzilla entry dated August 11, Mozilla has now started the process of adding WebP support to Firefox.

Currently, WebP support is not included in any of Firefox's versions (Stable, Beta, Developer Edition, or Nightly).

When WebP support is added, it will be via a setting in the about:config page, and it will be set to "off" by default, meaning users will have to navigate to that page, type an option name, and double-click to activate it. WebP will be supported in both Firefox branches, for desktop editions and the Android browser.