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Comment by carlosjobim | Hacker News Reader

Because you also want to sell to customers who have older devices, which can't display WebP. People who are not computer enthusiasts can keep a machine around for a decade or more. The gains from using WebP are negligible, the downside when they break are significant.

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I would argue that the gain is more than "negligible" in some cases. I'm building an app involving storing and serving images and I'm surprised that for the same images with the same resolution/quality, WebP is often 3x-4x smaller than PNG, which translates to lower storage cost, faster serving time, and happier users. You made a good point that people with older devices wouldn't be able to use apps like mine. But for me, the gain is so significant that I might just accept that.

Lowering your hosting costs usually translates into savings counted in the tens or hundreds of dollars per year. Loosing just a single customer because they can't see images of your product means loosing income of tens or hundreds of dollars, depending on what you're selling. Now take that times hundreds, or thousands of customers.

Optimized JPG images are tiny, and will load fast on any device. Any web designer worth their salt must know how to make a performant site without needing WebP images.

If a computer/browser is so old it can't support WebP, it probably also can't support modern HTTPS/TLS requirements. How do they even check out?

TLS 1.2 is still widely supported; the standard dates from 2008, but didn't really get pushed hard IMHO until right before HeartBleed (April 2014); and there was the SHA1 certificate deprecation that took effect in 2016. A lot of things that got updated to use sha2 certs also got updated to use TLS 1.2, and should work fine with most https out there.

Chrome had support for WebP pretty early, because Google, but caniuse.com says 2018 for Edge, 2019 for Firefox and 2020 for Safari. There's a lot of potential software out there that works in a post-2016 timeframe, but not with WebP.

MacOS Mojave was released in 2018 and the stock Safari browser does not support WebP, even when updated.

the http stack is updated as part of the app/browser, media codecs are often updated as part of the OS

> media codecs are often updated as part of the OS

I thought that was mainly true in the Apple world. Does that apply to Windows and Linux too? (As in, I thought many browsers implement their own codecs)

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