I guess I'm using WebP now?
October 8, 2026
After using the same few image formats for 20+ years, I’m now on the WebP bandwagon. That isn’t something I thought I’d ever say. Now I’m wondering how soon it’ll be before I can use a couple more.
When Google announced the WebP format in 2010 it was interesting, but only academically. WebP support was added to Chrome in 2011, 1 but other browsers took their time supporting it: Edge in 2018, Firefox in 2019, and Safari in 2020. Until there was baseline support, the format was only being used selectively by content delivery networks. Even then, WebP was a pain to work with. Photoshop didn’t get native support until 2022, but its “Save for Web” and “Export As” features still don’t support the format.
Because of all this, I found WebP annoying. I wasn’t alone, either. Things weren’t helped by Google’s eagerness to push the format. Their Lighthouse tool would often complain that images weren’t in WebP, even when file size savings were relatively minor and format support was immature. For the past 20+ years, I’ve only really used JPEGs, PNGs, and (later) SVGs to serve images on the web. 2
Since ditching Photoshop for Pixelmator Pro, I now have much nicer tooling for dealing with WebP images. It turns out they’re pretty good? In the past two Liquid Glass grumble-pieces, I used WebPs because they were smaller than JPEGs or PNGs at the same visual quality. This won’t always be the case, but I’ve not yet encountered a situation where WebP doesn’t come out on top. Google has some findings on this for lossy and lossless versions of WebP.
It’s not very surprising that WebP has advantages over JPEG or PNG. Even when I found the format annoying, I knew there were benefits. The difference is that I no longer have to go out of my way to use the format. Now I’m wondering if/when newer standards like JPEG XL or AVIF will be supported by Pixelmator Pro. AVIF in particular looks very promising to me, and it also has baseline support across browsers. Just a few days ago, Google announced it was shipping JPEG XL support, 3 so that might hit baseline in the near future as well.
I’m certainly not as annoyed by AVIF or JPEG XL. Hopefully I won’t have to wait as long to easily take advantage of them.
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And, of course, Opera. ↩
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GIFs were also around, but only really for memes. Now they’re usually transformed into much smaller videos. I last used GIFs on the regular when I was laying things out with tables. ↩
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After having dropped it not too long ago. Google’s gonna Google. ↩