It supports transparency, animations, and compression, and seems to look really good even with very strong compression. It's a shame that, despite it coming out 13 years ago, it's still barely supported by so much software.
I disabled webp in firefox and still had to get a secondary image converter extension to get around this format, I wish I could opt out forever.
Legitimately amazing compression for gifs, but isn't supported for shit outside of the browser it comes in, be it editing images or upload to older online galleries. Good luck to anyone who just renames the file format to png/jpeg, now you have no idea what's actually the correct format when you need it... I used to think that was a good idea, until I faced programs that would not run 'renamed' formats whatsoever.
Google invented .webp to save corporations lots and lots of bandwidth with the new reduced image size. Technically it's the choice of the site host to distribute images as .webp so Lemmy is a bit guilty as well for adopting the standard. I don't like Webp, for some reason they don't get treated as image files when you try to visit their source or open them in a windows file structure, instead it takes you to some shitty bloated webpage with more than just the image.