GoKawiil
Tech News
A longtime holdout who stuck with JPEGs, PNGs and SVGs says he has now started using WebP images, crediting better tooling in Pixelmator Pro after switching away from Photoshop. He reports WebP consistently produced smaller files than JPEG or PNG at similar visual quality in recent projects, though he notes Photoshop still lacks WebP support in its Save for Web and Export As tools.
Developers have released wpd, an open-source WebP image decoder written in Rust with handwritten assembly for performance-critical routines. The project aims to avoid the memory-safety bugs common in C-based decoders like libwebp, while matching or exceeding its decoding speed. Source code is available on GitHub under halidecx/wpd.
A compression engineer revisits JPEG XL's standing on the Web, noting that despite its technical strengths over JPEG and WebP, Chrome dropped support in 2023. He points out that a new Rust-based JPEG XL decoder has since appeared in Firefox and parts of Chrome, partly to avoid repeating a security flaw once found in WebP, but argues this alone doesn't settle whether JPEG XL deserves broad Web adoption.