It’s a better format than JPEG, GIF, or PNG, while doing the jobs of all of those, but better (in most cases), and is an open format. It also has wide compatibility nowadays. The only major downside is a lot of social media services don’t even think about it being a potential format due to a lack of awareness/wide usage, leading to a degraded experience when someone shares a WebP somewhere (lack of auto-embedding as an example). I suspect this is why it gets a lot of hate here, which is unfortunate because it’s not at all the fault of the format.
AVIF (based on AV1) is the up-and-coming format that beats WebP in most cases now, but support isn’t quite there yet (mostly due to Apple), and it has the same problems for social media as WebP. However, it doesn’t have any true lossless mode AFAIK. HEIF (based on HEVC) is also good, but is heavily patent-encumbered and not as open. JPEG-XL is dope and potentially even better in some aspects, but has very poor support across the board.
one important tidbit in this whole situation that sheds a lot of light on where and why is adopted: webp is Google’s horse, jpegxl is adobe’s horse. that’s why jpegxl has poor web support, and why webp pisses off designers.
It doesn’t piss off designers, but we’re pissed at Adobe for making us search for and download plugins to support it.
Seriously, fuck Adobe.
eh, it’s just two stubborn corporate entities trying to throw their weight around. the only reason adobe looks bad here is because Google is winning. they both stubbornly refuse to allow the other’s standard on their platforms.
jpegxl is the better format, without a doubt, but adobe is a fool if they think they can strongarm Google.
to me, adobe is being foolish, but they’re both equally being evil.
AVIF only beats WebP for heavily compressed images and it doesn’t beat it by much.
If you want high quality images - then WebP is way better than AVIF. And if you want a lossless image then AVIF is totally useless. Lossless AVIF files are often 2x or 3x larger than an uncompressed image. WTF.
Lossless WebP images can be as good as a quarter the size of an uncompressed source.
And as bandwidth improves and images don’t really get much bigger (we’re already at the limit of human visual perception for reasonable file sizes) for me that makes WebP a better compression algorithm than AVIF.
