People genuinely hate WebP images
I have known for a long time that some of my friends don't like or rather don't understand the WebP image format, but I didn't know that people genuinely hate the format for some reason.
I use WebP images on this site and love them for how good they are – high quality at significantly smaller file sizes. In fact, WebP images also support alpha transparency just like PNGs, and are now supported by almost all web browsers out there.
Practically, I don't understand why people hate WebP images, but the following could be reasons when I think from others' perspective:
- Unsupported by legacy apps and systems, and people had to convert to other formats to use. Like you import it into a presentation or in a document, and it doesn't work.
- Browsers and other major platforms suddenly started serving WebP versions of images, and it was kind of forced on them.
I think, people will keep hating the WebP format, always. And it will soon become outdated too, as there are better formats like AVIF and JPEG XL slowly taking over. These newer formats have better compression sizes, maintain sharper details, and even support full HDR color spaces.
Let's see.
By the way, I found this cool community website about JPEG XL that has a lot of comparisons and information about the format.