Mozilla has finally followed up on its 2016 plan of supporting Google’s WebP image format on its browser Firefox, by announcing that Firefox 65 is all set to finally support the image format which boasts of the following qualities: “WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images.”
In the absence of this support, Firefox users had to use hitherto view images in traditional image formats like PNG or JPEG, which in turn limits the web servers’ ability to make images available in WebP format on Firefox; an ability enabled already on Chrome and Chromium-based browsers such as Opera or Vivaldi.
The support has already been enabled on the cutting edge development channel, the Nightly version of Firefox 65; the developer’s bug report layout for which was hitherto marked ‘missing’, and has now been updated to read ‘fixed’. Nightly users, however, still have to enable the feature manually by going through the following steps, since it is disabled in the default condition:
- Load about: config in the Firefox address bar.
- Confirm that you will be careful.
- Search for the preference image.webp.enabled.
- Double-click on the choice to set it to ‘True’
- Search for the preference ‘image.http.accept’.
- Double-click this
- Change its value to ‘image/webp,*/*’
- The user may need to restart the browser.
