Estimates are that 95% of Internet users have a browser that supports WebP and that ~25% of the top million websites serve WebP images. I wouldn't call that abysmal.
Not sure if that's version specific, but my one can (version 26.7.0) without any issues or warnings. Tried with this sample file: https://www.gstatic.com/webp/gallery/1.webp
I was about to write that Slack doesn't support webp but I just tested it and it does. For years I have been typing "convert file.webp file.jpg" and then posting that in slack but it looks like they have added support.
Or convert before you upload because the image host has delusions about fighting the Google monoculture by refusing WebP support. Even more of a head scratcher when WebM is their only video format.
on the contrary. on macOS apps don't have to support image (or movie) formats. it is done by the system and transparently handled by the APIs. apps automatically gain new formats when the system adds it.
And having to bring in support for formats that are deprecated by the OS, if they decide to keep supporting that format as there is sufficient demand from their users, is worse than having to bring in support for all formats rather than getting support from the OS?
Having ask that in a slightly confrontational way, one of the reasons I started using VLC all those years ago, and still use it to this day, was having trouble with other media players that relied on OS support fail to work well (or at all) with some codecs, while VLC brought support for them, and their dog, built-in and reliable. Dragging your own format support libraries with you can be beneficial.
I meant Windows, as macOS and Linux are usually good with modern things. It’s trivial to add the support if you don’t have it. I have no idea about Windows, but I got this vibe of someone using Win7 in 2025 and complaining the world moved on and keeps moving on.
I'm convinced that this is because of the prevalent MVP culture in modern software engineering. Instead of holistically looking at a new feature request such as "support webp images" we break it down into parts (e.g. "serve webp" "accept webp upload here" "accept webp upload there") and then we call it a MVP when only the highest priority items are done.
That doesn’t mean it’s dead, it rather shows sheer incompetence of the web dev departments of these wonderful companies for whom webp or avif aren’t images, I guess.
Maybe using VLC Media Player from an early age has left me with too high expectations.
But if I have a program designed to view or edit a certain class of file, and it doesn't support a certain file format, I will blame that program.
GIMP and Gwenview have supported webp (the latter via platform image plugins that add support to other applications as well) since before you encountered them online. Maybe choose better tools.
I could save my photos as BMPs like early digital cameras did but that doesn't make it practical or reasonable. My camera takes pictures as RAW or HEIF files. Why would I save my photos to a primarily lossy codec that's optimized and designed for distribution rather than preserving fidelity?
We used to do this with JPEG, in fact. And that's why many pictures on Facebook from pre-2018 or so all have a distinctive grainy look. It's artifacts on top of artifacts. Storage on phones isn't tight anymore, we don't need to store photos in a format meant to minimize bytes at the expense of quality.
There's more on Instagram than photos. Lotta meme pages, lot of people just uploading random screenshots and photos they downloaded that have been turned over a million times. Heck, all it takes is someone downloading their own photo from SocialMediaX to reupload on SocialMediaY, or just uploading a the WebP that they exported for their website.
Instagram hasn't even been primarily or even secondarily about photos for a long time. Indeed trying to "just" upload a photo is made super inconvenient these days.
Tangentially related but Instagram is really the worst plattform for photos. I don't understand why they crop and downsize (!) pictures. Not even Twitter does this, it's unironically a better photo plattform.
Unless you're uploading memes you've downloaded from elsewhere, this strictly isn't true. I'd consider myself an Instagram power user and the only thing that I and all the people I interact with is photos and videos. None of those are webp, or would have been worthwhile to save as webp as an intermediate format.
Could it be a lack of resources? Or some missing expertise? Maybe they could find some interns who are familiar with it? Maybe the entire world is so obsessed w AI, we don't even care about image formats anymore.
Honestly this kind of stuff happens all the time in large companies.
Interns won't want to work on a dead end like this. Moreso they need to be supervised by someone that doesn't want to get removed by being the lowest X% usefulness in a company. So all these existing tools that aren't primary revenue generators just sit on coast mode.
If you are using an image optimization service like Imgix / Cloudflare Image Resizing then it doesn't really matter, image can be uploaded as any supported format and will be sent to the end user according to their "Accept" header
Sure, ur then it’s my image viewer, my phones image viewer, the website I try and upload pictures to. This isn’t a problem you can solve by patching one application, and it’s not one the world as a whole cares about.
Better image formats serve entities who store images at scale, not end users.
I can tell you, I have personally worked with a global corporation and we estimated that for one of their websites, supporting the 3% that we exclude by using “modern standards” would be more costly than the amount of revenue they get from them. So in that case, it was a rational decision. And up to the 10% cut, management just didn’t want to do the extra investment. So if something falls below that 10% threshold, they just don’t care to get it fixed.
> it was a rational decision. And up to the 10% cut, management just didn’t want to do the extra investment
Rational, or economical? I find it rational to help someone in need since I'd want others to do the same to me, even if it's not financially profitable for me. Imo more factors flow into what's rational, but I understand what you mean by corporate greed working this way (less than 10% of people are blind, neither male nor female, run a free operating system or can't afford a new computer, etc., so yep they're not profitable groups and for-profits don't optimise for that)
You are using the notion of rationality wrong. Rational reasoning can only help you find how to achieve goals that align with your values. It is strictly worthless in choosing your values.
If a corporation has determined that profit maximization is their core tenet, excluding the needs of a minority of users can likely be deduced in a rational manner from that tenet. That is precisely why values need to be forced onto corporate actors through regulation, e.g. in this case through mandatory accessibility guidelines like EU directive 2019/882 that enters into force this very week.
Rational reasoning also takes into account long-term and second and higher order effects which quarterly profit-driven reasoning often ignores. If you support 95% of users and your competitor supports 100% then that may help your competitor getting 100% of them while you get none.
In my experience, accessibility features are needed by about 1.5% of users (E-commerce and some internal business tools). So by your logic, the rational choice is to exclude accessibility?
Or Linux users? Or even Firefox users in our market?
Something is off in this calculation, how did they get to such a high cost for such a simple thing as an alternative image format when the web supports multiple???
My guess would be that the users hitting different types of issues are mostly the same; someone who can't view an alternative image format is using an obscure old browser or obscure OS that will inevitably have a ton of other issues too, and fixing only a subset of the issues would not make much difference.
No, this was not about the alternative image format. This was about the browsers and screen resolutions that we choose to fully support.
We took the data directly from the website visitors analytics.
Basically .. resolutions under 1024px and anything older than edge 11 was left out of the scope.
Thanks for demonstrating why laws like ADA are needed to force companies to not be bad citizens. We desperately need similar laws to force compatibility with older hardware - one could even champion it under environmental protection.
> 5% of people can't view them, yet 25% of top websites use them?
That's not how it works.
The server declares what versions of media it has, and
the client requests a supported media format. The same trick have been used for audio and video for ages too.
This problem was solved by HTTP since forever. Client sends `Accept` header with supported formats and server selects the necessary content with corresponding `Content-Type` header. You don't need any HTML tags for it.
Images are often at different resolutions too, that way, depending on the pixel density of the device, and the physical size, the browser can select the photo that has high enough resolution, but not one that is needlessly large, while also selecting the preferred image format.
File extensions are just a hint about what the file might be and have nothing to do with what the file actually is. If the server sets the MIME type, the browser will use that as the hint.
But even beyond that, most file formats have a bit of a header at the start of the file that declares the actual format of the file. Browsers already can understand that and use the correct render for a file without an extension.
I agree with the point you're trying to make, but your examples are terrible. Music industry doesn't have too much to do to help deaf people. It's not like they're deliberately making deaf-inaccessible music instead of relying on the old good deaf-accessible music formats.
(Also, the parent comment's example is also not so good because as someone else pointed just because the top 25% websites are serving webp it does mean they're not serving alternative formats for those who does not support it, as this is quite trivial to setup)
Estimates are that 95% of Internet users have a browser that supports WebP and that ~25% of the top million websites serve WebP images. I wouldn't call that abysmal.