Image Format Chaos

[quad...@gmail.com]

Reading a news item about a compression engine by Google for producing improved
JPEG images, I learned that earlier Google had developed a new image format,
WebP, which allowed images to take up less space.

WebP is supported by Google Chrome and some other browsers that use the same
open-source rendering engine, such as Opera and Safari, apparently. But it isn't
supported by Firefox, or, AFAIK, Internet Explorer.

I remembered that some time ago, there was the JPEG 2000 image format which
provided better compression. But the software I've used with such images has
been rather on the slow side. Anyways, I was wondering what happened to it, so I
did a web search.

And I learned about JPEG XR. This improved image format _is_ supported on
Internet Explorer, because it uses patented technology developed by Microsoft -
but apparently Microsoft is making the format freely available. Nobody else,
though, appears to support it.

If the technology exists to significantly improve on the compression of JPEG
images, it should be put to use. But it won't get anywhere if there are three
incompatible formats, some of which work on some browsers but not others. That
will make the improved formats too complicated to bother with.

John Savard