Recently, Google started changing the web in some interesting ways. A lot by contributing code. It started with projects such as the Chrome web browser, which quickly achieved a market shares over 10%, which is more than Apple Safari and Opera together.

And the good side, Chrome did not actually add “yet another incompatible platform”, but by being closely related to Safari (or more precisely WebKit), it is not that different.

Other stuff that belongs into this category is the Google Web Toolkit and the closure compiler (which essentially is a JavaScript code checker and optimizer).

But recently, Google goes a step further. They started tackling internet file formats. First they proposed a new Video codec known as WebM or VP8. Now they extracted an image format out of this codec, known as WebP.

There is some serious doubt on the quality, the images do appear to be a bit blurry and lose details. I concur with JPEG even being a bit better, despite the block artefacts. The blurry results of WebP are not really convincing.

The h.264 based image looks best to me, but H.264 is patent-encumbered for all I know, so we might not see this new format in wide use until 2028. This already ruled out other image formats such as JBIG or FIF. Or look at audio formats: we’re still using MP3 everywhere, because everyone tries to push another patent-encumbered audio format that the others are not going to adopt. So MP3 remains the only thing widely accepted (Ogg Vorbis is nice, but it looks as if companies such as Apple are not going to adopt it, probably because they have interest in other formats. Maybe the Ogg Vorbis support in Chrome will help here on the long run).

In particular, why would you pay royalties for a tiny bit of image quality, given the constantly sinking prices of bandwidth? The H.264 patents may make a difference on video data, they probably won’t pay of for still images.

Given that WebM is sometimes claimed to be a simplified H.264 (minus the patent issues?), WebP probably is as good as we can get to the H.264 based quality without running into the same patent issues?

But enough on the image data. There is one thing, I’d really like to see Google change on the web. The worst thing about the web is called JavaScript (or more accurately, ECMAScript). There is just so much wrong with this language that we really need to replace it ASAP.

Some things that are wrong with JavaScript:

  • The syntax is about as crazy as Perl, anything could be valid code.
  • There a lot of syntax quirks and oddities. Try to test for a variable storing an Array …
  • It lacks any reasonable Standard Library - which is a key strength of modern languages such as Java, Python, C# - and which is why everbody is using one of the thousand JavaScript frameworks such as Dojo, Mojikit, Google Closure Library, Prototype, jQuery, MooTools, Yahoo UI Library, …
  • Due to the lack of standard functionality, the JavaScript development cost is a lot higher than needed, development time is bad for the triviality of most JavaScript tasks, and the file size is even worse than JPEG vs. WebP …

So my biggest wishlist item of Google to contribute to the Web via Chrome and Firefox is a new web scripting language. As much as I love python, the whitespace syntax of Python doesn’t work for the web (we need to be able to store complex statements in HTML attributes without newlines), so we’ll have to look for something else. Maybe Ruby will work?