Did you ever hear the tragedy of WebP The Efficient? I thought not. It’s not a story the GIF gang would tell you. It’s an image legend.
WebP was a new format of pictures, so efficient and so lightweight, it could use modern compression to influence the web pages to actually load faster…
It had such a knowledge of the user's needs that it could even keep transparency and animations from dying.
The power of modern computing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.
It became so widespread… The only thing we had to be afraid of, was people insisting on using formats from the 90's, which eventually, of course, they did.
Unfortunately, we didn't teach the noobs everything we knew about compression, then the noobs killed the format by converting it to PNG and sharing that.
Ironic. We could save the web from being too slow, but not from the users.
Please stop running bloated websites with megabytes of dependencies on my chromebook or Walmart PC with a Intel Celeron that is 6 times slower yes I benchmarked them than my phone then maybe I would consider webp.
All in all though seriously; the only good thing about webp and the only way to get good performance out of it is to make your own site on something like Neo Cities from hand crafted html5, css and JavaScript and not load bloated dependencies.
Plus in general people would rather use png because it can be viewed on everything and some websites and services outright refuse to support webp so why not use png or jpg-xl?
Because PNG files are lossless and way higher quality than you need for sharing a meme over Discord. Using the extra 3MB isn't worth it unless you can't avoid it. And Jpeg XL is not supported by any browser right now and Chromium removed support entirely. Thus it's most likely dead in the water, sadly. Your only other option for most things is regular old jpeg, which has all the old problems like lacking transparency.
Wow, fuck Google.