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Google creates image format for faster browsing 
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Google has created its own image format called WebP, as the web giant looks for more ways to speed up browsing.

Pronounced "weppy", WebP is a lossy image format, compressed to cut its file size down, just like the JPEG format it hopes to replace.


Read more: Google creates image format for faster browsing | News | PC Pro http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/361588/goog ... z11EdmN06Q

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Sat Oct 02, 2010 8:25 pm
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That will take a while to get adopted, if at all. I wonder if this format allows the embedding of meta data which Google can pick up and throw ads at you?

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Sat Oct 02, 2010 8:58 pm
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It's funny that no browser currently supports the format so they have to use a .png wrapper. (8+)

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Sat Oct 02, 2010 9:01 pm
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It's an absolutely rubbish idea. First of all, the compression isn't actually any better than JPEG, provided you tune the compression levels in your JPEGs correctly. Secondly, we already HAVE a version of JPEG that does all the extra things like alpha channels this does; it's called JPEG2000 and no fecker uses it. Thirdly, no fecker uses it and no fecker will use it. Much like WebM or whatever it's called, Jobs and Ballmer will be found in bed together before they'll install native support for it in their company's browsers because they would both rather poke their eyes out with sticks than do anything that endorses Google in any way.

It's a solution to something nobody else thinks is a problem. It's the new Wave.

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Sat Oct 02, 2010 11:17 pm
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jonbwfc wrote:
It's an absolutely rubbish idea. First of all, the compression isn't actually any better than JPEG, provided you tune the compression levels in your JPEGs correctly. Secondly, we already HAVE a version of JPEG that does all the extra things like alpha channels this does; it's called JPEG2000 and no fecker uses it. Thirdly, no fecker uses it and no fecker will use it. Much like WebM or whatever it's called, Jobs and Ballmer will be found in bed together before they'll install native support for it in their company's browsers because they would both rather poke their eyes out with sticks than do anything that endorses Google in any way.

It's a solution to something nobody else thinks is a problem. It's the new Wave.

Jon


Well Safari is irrelevant as browsers go. As far as webkit goes, Chrome is king. Opera (admittedly also irrelevant) and Firefox will both support it, and the less said about Internet Explorer with regard to just about anything on the Internet, the better.

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Sat Oct 02, 2010 11:50 pm
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The compression is better than JPEG, given the same tuning. It filters differently, so gets rid of information that the human eye is unlikely to notice.

For it to be accepted, they need to start with the camera manufacturers - until either RAW or WebPiss become the standard format for taking a photo, as opposed to JPEG, it doesn't make any sense, because we will be taking lossy JPEG images and converting them into another lossy format, losing even more detail... :?

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Sun Oct 03, 2010 6:19 am
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Linux_User wrote:
Well Safari is irrelevant as browsers go.

13 million iOS device users say different. It may well be irrelevant in the desktop space but in that space the one that matters is IE and MS are unlikely to be interested in supporting it either. Chrome, with all due respect, isn't king of anything. It has almost exactly the same share as the browser you consider to be 'irrelevant'.

Jon


Last edited by jonbwfc on Sun Oct 03, 2010 9:00 am, edited 1 time in total.



Sun Oct 03, 2010 8:43 am
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big_D wrote:
The compression is better than JPEG, given the same tuning. It filters differently, so gets rid of information that the human eye is unlikely to notice.

OK, fine. I assume you have an very good stopwatch handy to measure the time difference it would take a 20K WebP image to download rather than a 22K JPEG?

As I say, we already have better alternatives to JPEG, nobody uses them because nobody cares. JPEG is 'good enough' and everything supports it. Not just web browsers or cameras - PMPs, DVRs, phones, televisions, picture frames... with the bandwidth available to users both at desktop and mobile increasing in leaps and bounds almost year by year, this simply isn't an issue anybody thought needed solving. Sit down and think about how many platforms we browse the web these days on. Most of them aren't running a desktop OS and most of them probably aren't upgradeable to allow for a new image format at all. The idea there is any 'business requirement' for this and any great groundswell of opinoin that we want something better than JPEG is just not present.

If Google actually wanted to do something useful rather than the 'throw sh!t at the wall and see what sticks' approach, they'd come up with a replacement for SMTP that made stuff like phishing and header faking impossible. If they used their industry weight to get that implemented and pushed through, that would truly be something we'd all benefit from.

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Sun Oct 03, 2010 8:55 am
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jonbwfc wrote:
If Google actually wanted to do something useful rather than the 'throw sh!t at the wall and see what sticks' approach, they'd come up with a replacement for SMTP that made stuff like phishing and header faking impossible. If they used their industry weight to get that implemented and pushed through, that would truly be something we'd all benefit from.

Jon

That would be very good, especially if they could do things that eliminated spam.

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Sun Oct 03, 2010 1:36 pm
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Amnesia10 wrote:
jonbwfc wrote:
If Google actually wanted to do something useful rather than the 'throw sh!t at the wall and see what sticks' approach, they'd come up with a replacement for SMTP that made stuff like phishing and header faking impossible. If they used their industry weight to get that implemented and pushed through, that would truly be something we'd all benefit from.

Jon

That would be very good, especially if they could do things that eliminated spam.

There are already two answers to that, but no fecker uses them...

SPF is trivial to implement, and provides a list of authorised senders against a domain. If everyone just set their DNS records up correctly, spam spoofed from genuine recognised domains could be practically eliminated. More importantly, I wouldn't keep losing critical emails because the spam filter ate them.

Digital IDs are a powerful method of proving who the sender is, and also securing the email in transit.

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Sun Oct 03, 2010 6:33 pm
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I would not mind having to use a digital ID if the benefits were worth it.

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Sun Oct 03, 2010 7:17 pm
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JJW009 wrote:
There are already two answers to that, but no fecker uses them...
SPF is trivial to implement, and provides a list of authorised senders against a domain. If everyone just set their DNS records up correctly, spam spoofed from genuine recognised domains could be practically eliminated. More importantly, I wouldn't keep losing critical emails because the spam filter ate them.

Actually quite a lot of ISPs do provide SPF records but as they're not mandated you can't rely on their presence. So a lot of places that 'spam score' give a message from an MTA that doesn't have a valid SPF record a higher spam score but you can't just block them. What I'm thinking of is some sort of follow up to SMTP that has things like SPF, server validation and encryption built directly in to the protocol rather than being optional add ons.
In email terms, we're all puttering round in Model T Fords that have had superchargers and what have you bolted onto them, when what we could have is something that looks like the new Lotus Esprit, if we could all just agree about it.

JJW009 wrote:
Digital IDs are a powerful method of proving who the sender is, and also securing the email in transit.

Yep, but I'm not sure it's really practical to give one to every single person on the internet. How big would the certificate server have to be? What would possibly work is some sort of 'personal PKI' so you could give a self-generated cert to everyone you knew and they could then 'tag' messages sent to you with that cert, so you would know it was from them (obviously, the key is unique to each 'pairing'). Would make address fakery much less useful. Course you'd have to get all email client to support them, which would be... faff. Maybe once we all migrate to webmail clients it'll be do-able...

These are the kinds of things Google should be doing, rather than image formats that nobody actually wants.

Jon


Mon Oct 04, 2010 10:34 am
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Surely the question should be... what's wrong with TIFF and BMP files?

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