There are currently 700 million iphones in use worldwide. There are roughly 100 million Mac computers. Most of these devices use the Safari browser. That is a significant minority which cannot be ignored.
If an ordinary, non-graphics savvy user downloads a WebP image from a website (right-click > save), they are basically stuck with a useless image. It doesn’t open natively on a Windows computer without downloading a codec. It doesn’t open on Apple products. It doesn’t open in Photoshop without an extension. Most people simply won’t know what to do with the file. They can’t upload them to Instagram. They can’t send them to friends because people won’t recognize the file format, and they’ll assume they’re spam or a virus.
The only place they are of any use is on websites, and while it’s true that they generally compress to much smaller sizes compared to the same image as a jpg, their is a slight loss of quality in some cases. Softening, artifacting, saturation issues, and blockiness in gradations. But the important difference is this… for small images (say less than 600px x800px) the difference in size between WebP and Jpg does not equate to a huge difference in loading time. Tenths of a second in most cases. But for larger images, which are typically going to be used for photo galleries, most people don’t want to sacrifice image quality.
I ran your site www.yourweblab.nl/full-screen through Google pagespeed insights and got 95 mobile and 96 desktop, which is quite fast, but that’s to be expected since there is only one image.
I ran a site I’m building right now, https://www.eliteinsights.com/ which uses good quality jpg and png images, AND has a slideshow, and I scored 81 mobile and 96 desktop. Almost the same as yours. So switching to WebP would be a pointless waste of time for me, and big headache to code all the image fallbacks. So, why bother?
Further, 90% of the websites I build are for clients in areas served by high-speed internet, so the difference in WebP file sizes would have an almost unnoticeable impact on site loading speed. I suppose in regions of the world where they don’t have 4G or broadband, WebP would make sense, but not in most populated parts of the U.S.
Right now, Google and other companies are pushing to save bandwidth and transfer volume to keep up with the growth of the web, but it’s a wasted effort. In ten years, 5G or similar will be ubiquitous, and the globe will be served by satellite hi-speed internet, so all these formats like WebP and Accelerated Mobile Pages will be for naught. Every web page, no matter how complex will load in a second or two.
It reminds me of way back in the days when hard disk storage was very expensive, and we used to use compression and decompression algorithms on every file written and read so we could fit more stuff on the disk. Now, storage is so cheap nobody even cares how big a file is.
