this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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[โ€“] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It's not "people" who are causing the proliferation of formats like webp though, it's the web industry.

If you are a web platform, you want a format that gives you acceptable quality for the smallest size to reduce your bandwidth. You also want one that loads as fast as possible from a CPU prospective, so your site renders as fast as possible.

These are factors webp was designed for.

To your point, for home users jpeg remains a good-enough choice with no reason to change it. A preferred choice even, due to broad legacy compatibility. But we aren't seeing proliferation of webp because people are at home willingly going "file -> export as -> webp" - no, we're seeing it because industry is converting uploads to it, and people are saving those images.

These are factors webp was designed for.

I thought it was designed so that Google could continue to de-facto own the web.