Why do we hate WebP?

Nobody asked for it. Nobody wanted it. And yet, here we are.

WebP appeared one day like a coworker who microwaves fish in the open space and then acts surprised when people are upset. Google released it in 2010, declared it "the future of images on the web," and then spent the next decade watching the entire internet quietly pretend it didn't exist.

And honestly? Fair.

It Sounds Like a Sneeze

Let's start with the name. WebP. Say it out loud. Now say it again in a meeting. "We should convert all our assets to WebP." You sound like you're describing a startup that sells artisanal VOIP solutions to mid-market SaaS companies. Nobody trusts a file format that ends in a consonant that isn't even trying.

JPEG sounds dependable. Like a plumber named JPEG who shows up on time and doesn't upsell you on pipe insurance. PNG sounds clean, clinical, like a Swiss engineer. GIF is a disaster but at least it's a fun disaster that people argue about at parties.

WebP sounds like something you get diagnosed with.

The Compatibility Era, or: A Love Letter to 2019

For roughly nine years, WebP had the energy of a guy at a dinner party loudly explaining why his diet is superior while everyone just wants to eat their pasta in peace. Technically correct. Deeply annoying. Completely uninvited.

Safari didn't support it until 2020. TWENTY TWENTY. The same year humanity collectively lost its mind, Safari finally decided WebP was acceptable. Internet Explorer, may it rest in chaos, never supported it at all, which means some of us spent entire sprints writing fallback logic so that grandma's Dell laptop running IE11 could still see the hero image of a moisturizer website.

The fallback code looked like this:

<picture>
  <source srcset="hero.webp" type="image/webp">
  <source srcset="hero.jpg" type="image/jpeg">
  <img src="hero.jpg" alt="A product nobody needed in three sizes">
</picture>

Is it correct? Yes. Does it feel like you are personally apologizing to the browser? Also yes.

Photoshop Said No

For years, Adobe Photoshop did not support WebP natively. Not even a little bit. You had to install a plugin, written in what appeared to be ancient runes by a developer who last updated it in 2017 and whose GitHub bio just said "probably fine."

So the workflow became: export as PNG, open a converter, pray, get a file back that was somehow larger than the original, question your career choices, and then go back to using JPEGs like a person with dignity.

Designers hated it. Developers hated it. The one person in the office who actually advocated for WebP was always, and I cannot stress this enough, the same person who also advocated for tabs over spaces and storing passwords in a spreadsheet called "passwords FINAL v3."

Google Created It and Then Google Chrome Was the Only One Using It

There is something deeply poetic about the fact that Google invented WebP, Google Chrome was basically the only browser to support it for years, and Google PageSpeed Insights would dock your performance score for not using WebP.

It's like a teacher grading you on a textbook they wrote, in a language they invented, distributed only at their own bookstore.

"Why is your site slow?"
"Because I'm not using WebP."
"Why aren't you using WebP?"
"Because nobody can open WebP."
"Who told you that?"
"Safari."
"Safari is wrong."
"Safari has 20% market share."
"..."

This conversation happened in every agency, in every timezone, for an entire decade.

The File Size Promise vs. The File Size Reality

The whole pitch for WebP was size. Smaller files. Faster loads. Google said WebP images are 25 to 34% smaller than comparable JPEG images. And technically, this is true. In the same way that technically, a 40 minute commute "isn't that bad."

In practice, converting a high quality photograph to WebP sometimes produced a file that looked like it had been photocopied at a Kinko's from 1994 and then uploaded on a 3G connection. Gradients got weird. Skin tones became a philosophical question. The compression algorithm apparently looked at human faces and decided they were optional.

And then someone would inevitably open the WebP in Windows Photo Viewer, which cannot open WebP, and send you an email saying "the image is broken" and you would have to explain the entire history of browser image formats to a person who just wanted a photo of a sandwich for the company newsletter.

It Won Anyway

Here is the worst part of this whole story.

WebP won.

It is now supported everywhere. It is genuinely smaller. It genuinely loads faster. Google Lighthouse will absolutely bully you if you don't use it. Every modern image CDN converts to it automatically. Next.js does it by default. Squoosh exists and it's actually fantastic. The ecosystem caught up, the tooling matured, and WebP is now simply the correct choice for most web images.

We went from "this format is cursed" to "this format is table stakes" in about four years, which is honestly faster than the web usually moves on anything.

So yes, we hate WebP. We hate it the way you hate a person who was annoying in high school and then turned out to be completely right about everything. We hate it because we had to suffer through the fallback <picture> tags. We hate it because of the Photoshop plugin. We hate it because of the awkward middle years where it existed but didn't really exist.

But mostly, if we are being honest, we hate it because we use it every single day now and we cannot even complain about it properly anymore.

Which is the worst kind of hate.

The kind you have to keep entirely to yourself.