Dev Already Distributing WebP-Enabled Firefox

If you thought part of the big WebP adoption holdup by Mozilla had anything to do with implementing its support involving a significant undertaking to code it in, nope; it seems that’s not the case at all, judging from Shay Elkin’s contribution to one of the multiple Mozilla bug threads on the topic. Shay offers simple instructions to make yourself a fresh build below.

Mozilla is approaching their third year of WebP debate. Take your time fellas! What’s “just a few kilobytes of savings” across the stupid clueless web worth anyway, right? When you run out of things to debate and daft insults to hurl, before making any devastating decisions you’ll surely regret, no problem, just wait for another player like Facebook to adopt WebP somehow and then you can debate the fallout from their users’ complaints for at least another five months, then repeat that forever while you watch your base of users just slowly fade away. Don’t worry, I’m sure some of them don’t care about progress.

Shay Elkin, 2013-05-12 09:10:18 PDT, Comment 66

I try to maintain a webp-enabled and updated version of mozilla-central (the patch is the same as the one in this bug)

You can find it at https://github.com/EverythingMe/mozilla-central Assuming you have a configured build environment, the following will get you a Firefox build with webp support:

git clone –branch webp git@github.com:EverythingMe/mozilla-central.git
cd mozilla-central
./mach build

Really frustrating fellas. Perhaps Matt Brubeck could swing by and offer me some clarity again, perhaps starting with Fennec’s lack of WebP support, the only Android browser I can find that doesn’t seem to support it.

Doug Simmons