It’s being pushed by Google as a format exclusively designed for the web. It’s annoying as fuck because it just started showing up randomly and it’s annoying to use for the reasons you mentioned.

Interestingly enough, the first thing it did was put a speedbump in front of is downloading an image from a Google images search. Imagine that.

I think browsers are starting to convert it locally as saving images seems to be slowly returning to some kind of normal. Maybe.

Layman’s suspicion: adoption is hard when nearly everyone and their uncle knows and supports gif/jpg/png. At least for most end consumers there’s no major advantage to adopting early. And in such a scenario most people adopt when they are forced to because everyone else adopted. So it’s a hen-egg problem.

Ideally when you introduce a new format you support both the old and new format concurrently over a long time to allow for a gradual transition. The major advantage of webp/avif is that they need less storage space for the same quality. However if you have to store everything in an extra format whilst also keeping the old ones you are completely reversing that storage advantage and now need even more storage volume than before.

As far as I can tell AVIF has much better prospects of being the future image format anyways. In the long run that is. Plus it’s open source and not just a single tech giant behind it. Suffers from the same slow adoption rates though.

I know that some CDNs like Akamai will serve it up in cases where it optimizes delivery of the image. They have an add-on service for their customers called Image and Video Manager. Among other things it can compress images to improve performance.

Imagine a website that displays a JPG file that has thousands of colors and a resolution of 10,000x10,000 pixels. That’s terrible for loading across the internet because the human eye can’t distinguish that many colors and most devices have screens smaller than 10k. The website in question could also be putting that image in a frame that’s only 1k in size.

So what Akamai’s service does when it sees this image is that after serving it up the first time it optimizes it to a number of different sizes and formats. It will make multiple copies in different resolutions & file formats, and reduce the number of colors without impacting the visual appearance of the image. The optimizations target popular devices & browsers, so you could end up with a bunch of different sized jpegs, webps, pngs, etc.

Once all those versions have been created they are automatically added to Akamais CDN cache. The next time a person visits that website Akamai will look at the characteristics of the device being used and serve the best optimized version of the image that the device supports. So if you’re running Chrome on a mobile device you might get a 800x800 webp version of the image rather than the original 10,000x10,000 version, for example.

I like webp for space and bandwidth reasons (300 KB PNG -> 35 KB webp) but support among applications/services seems spotty.

Like, my phone’s gallery supports webp no problem. But Google Voice or my phone’s SMS app will not handle them at all. I don’t have a converter app, so I open it in gallery, take and then crop a screen shot if I need to send it to someone (crude but effective).

With Lemmy, a lot of admins force conversion of uploads to webp on the backend to save storage costs and reduce bandwidth. If you want to get a different format, such as png, you can add ?format=png to the end of the image URL. That’s one of the options I’m working to add to my custom UI (download image as [webp, png, jpg] ) because I’ve run into the same problems as you when trying to share things from here.

It’s being pushed by Google. If a website includes webp it will have a better score on Google PageSpeed Insights, since webp files are smaller than jpg thus the page loads faster. The PageSpeed score is one of the metrics that Google uses to rank the website on Google search.