We all are familiar with webp image format and the benefits of using it.
For the sake of those who have not yet explored about it -> WebP
Despite this, we are not using it the way we should. Why?
It's been more than 9 years since it was released by google. I mean the only question is about public acceptability. So why can't we developers make this our habit to use this format?
New Post Related to WebP:
It seems to be a vicious cycle. Everything is saving in those formats because we made the applications that way.
And now we can't change due to that.
Yep. I think change has to come from big guys, supporting it out of the box. Like image preview on OS level, thumbnails in OS, previews in dropbox etc.
This is damn right.
Here is a feature request to Microsoft for webp. Vote it if you want webp support to be included in Windows:
I would have to say that it probably comes down to two things:
As far as browser support is concerned, the picture tag is the simplest and the best solution for it.
That still falls apart on IE, and it's still more work than many are willing to put in.
Keep in mind that there are an unfortunate number of 'web developers' who only work in stuff like Dreamweaver, and as a result are entirely beholden to how whatever their HTML editor happens to be handles this type of thing.
We all are familiar with webp image format and the benefits of using it.
I have literally never heard of WebP in my entire life.
I think there's another cause: webp does nothing new.
It does existing things in slightly fewer bytes, so there's no features that drive us from older formats to webp.
While ~25% may seem like a lot, it's not like the difference between x264 and x265 which directly influences the quality and resolutions available. It's also not going to make the difference between "usable" and "unusable", so while the images occupy the lion share of the load time for many websites, we've been trained to make that work, so there's no pull to move away from there either. And sure, any speed up is nice, but this is going to make only slight difference rather than a completely different experience.
I suspect thats because everything is saving in png/jpg (smartphone photo, screenshots), and you need additional apps on the desktop/mobile to open webp. This is just too much hassle. As for devs, they are lazy - most of the times they arent even optimizing jpegs, so knowing and using whole another format to improve performance is just beyond their reach.