I guess I'm using WebP now?

https://squoosh.app/editor is a great app to compare how well an image compresses with newer formats like AVIF and WebP, compared to JPG/PNG.

It feels more practical now to have a fast loading page with large images now without too much effort. It was far too much of a burden before to have to provide fallbacks to older formats, on top of different images for different screen sizes/densities.

Webp does not have hardware decode and does not support progressive.

I speculate the asymmetric push is a case of it solving Google’s problem (bandwidth cost) but not the end user’s problems (battery and latency).

So as every time I read something decrying how webp is allegedly "annoying", the conclusion is that the problem was never about webp itself but the tooling and ecosystem to handle it

Google aren't pushing WebP. Google Docs / Slides still don't support it.

I appreciate Google isn't a monolith, but that lack of consistency makes it really hard to shake the impression certain tribes within it are at war with each other.

Just as with JPEG2000, I'm still not convinced the additional complexity is worth it. There seems to be a lot of immature technologies being pushed in the past few years, when IMHO the Web should've stabilised long ago on the basics. But I guess people need things to do to keep them employed... and Big Tech needs to maintain its monopolies.

Avif.

Especially for animated images. Comparing webp or avif sizes to gif is easily a factor of five to ten when animated.

Why? Just skip webp altogether, an annoying footnote that caused more issues than it solved.

Go straight to jpeg xl and/or avif when the they are mature.

One forum I use does not embed webp links. They show up as links, period, and it's a damn waste of my time to convert. Small is beautiful unless your forum is run by two people, not having the time to update code all the time.

Many image links that work for search engines don't work for the site and I have to download and then upload to a host to get an embeddable image link.

The one annoying thing about WebP is that you can no longer see from the file extension whether some image is lossy or lossless.

The other annoying thing is the name, because surprisingly we use images in non-web-related contexts as well. Admittedly, PNG technically has a very similar issue, but it’s less in your face.

Annoyingly Google voice doesn't support it at all, either. I've installed a firefox extension[0] that saves any image as .JPG,.PNG, or .WEBP

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/siat/