Facebook to Firefox: Please add WebP image support
Engineers for the powerful Web site like Google's image format and are encouraging Mozilla to support it in Firefox.
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Facebook's engineers like Google's WebP and want Mozilla to build support for the image format into the Firefox browser.
Google hopes to speed Web performance with the image format, which can do the job of both of today's major graphics formats, JPEG and PNG. Facebook began testing WebP support in April.
And now it looks like the powerful company has become Google's biggest ally in the effort to promote WebP. Mozilla is deciding whether to reverse its earlier opposition to WebP, and Facebook programmer Bryan Alger on Wednesday encouraged Firefox developers to do so in a comment on Mozilla's WebP bug tracker Wednesday:
I am the Facebook engineer examining the adoption of webp as a serving format. We are very excited about the new format and keeping a close eye on the community to monitor adoption. It is entirely likely we will be serving webp images in some capacity in the short term after we address user complaints from our limited testing. It goes without saying, we would love to see webp support coming to Firefox soon.
WebP currently is supported in Chrome, Opera, and Android.
However, support for WebP is rare in major image-editing software, making it hard for designers to use right now and hard for people to handle image files they want to download from the Web.
Several Facebook users who were in the WebP test complained about that issue. Lack of WebP support means people can't view, edit, or share images conveniently.
Correction, May 9 at 7:55 a.m. PT: This story was updated to note that Opera already supports WebP.