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Comment by Sammi | Hacker News Reader

Also webp support in browsers is looking pretty good these days: https://caniuse.com/webp

The last major browser to add support was Safari 16 and that was released on September 12, 2022. I see pretty much no one on browsers older than Safari 16.4 in metrics on websites I run.

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People want to use images outside of browsers too.

What apps are you using in 2025 that handle images but doesn't support webp?

I can't think of any on my Fedora desktop for instance.

Luminar Neo, for example, doesn't handle webp. And there's more than just Fedora, IIRC.

Lots of websites that expect me to upload images only accept jpeg and png.

Another one I recently interacted with are video backgrounds for zoom. Those apparently can only be jpeg, not even png

Yeah, after seeing the logs I made the switch to webp earlier this year. As much as I hate to admit it (not a fan of Google), it’s a pretty big bandwidth savings for the same (or better) quality.

I switched to webp on my forum for avatars and other user image uploads.

With one format you get decent filesize, transparency, and animation which makes things much simpler than doing things like conditionally producing gifs vs jpegs.

.. or you can go directly to avif - https://caniuse.com/avif (93%) instead of webp (95% support).

I'd love to see a comparison of the computational expense of avif compared to webp. I know av1, which avif is based off, is pretty hard on the hardware.

https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front

See various charts. For example, this table:

https://res.cloudinary.com/cloudinary-marketing/images/f_aut...

For decoding,

Webp - ~70Mpx/s,

jpeg - 100 to 300 Mpx/s

Jpeg xl - 115 to 163

Avif (single thread) - 32 to 37

Avif (multithread) - 90 to 110

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