You get the exact same quality at around ~25% smaller than other image formats. Unfortunate that it’s not supported by everything, but yeah it’s a better image format practically in that sense.
On the web this saves money when storing at a large scale, and it can have a significant impact on page speed when loading websites on slower connections.
The problem is rather the opposite of the meme. The file format is fine, but there is so little effort into making it happen.
If we were trying then I should be able to upload webp images everywhere. The most egregious is websites that will convert jpg and png uploads to webp but don't allow webp upload.
I've personally used webp for when I need lossy compression with alpha channel. What good alternatives are there? Png is not lossy and jpeg does not support alpha. Is JXL better than WebP? AVIF? JPEG2000?
I haven't had an issue with webp support myself, kinda surprised to see people stating it like it happens all the time
The only tool I've used that didn't support it was the FOMOD creation tool when making some small Starfield foods, and that actually DID support webp, it just threw an error but would show the image and mod managers would load it no problem
Or is this an example of the difference between people who use Linux and Windows regularly?
Webp is superior to jpg and far smaller than png. Making a map tile that has transparency and is bigger than 20x20 grid squares leaves you the choice between a huge png or a tiny webp. VTTs like foundry have best practice guidelines re image sizes and formats and it is simply not possible to follow these using png unless the map in question is tiny, and if you ignore them and just go for a huge png your players may be faced with lag, longer loading times etc.
I don't even understand the point of webp. Why do we need to make pngs and jpegs smaller? Who has internet that can't handle those files most of the time? It's not like people are posting 500 mb images.
It would be nice if mobile browsers/apps would convert them. When I save a webp and want to share it... Whelp, can't do that - doesn't even show up in the list of images.
If I didn't have an extension to convert to PNG then idk what I would do. I guess I'd just stop sharing memes forever because the corporates made meme sharing technology proprietary? That's sad as hell.
I'm not sure if this will work for everyone, but when I want to share something from the web with my iphone, I just change the file name from "somememe.webp" to "somememe.png" and it works fine.