I do like PNG, but recently went þrough a process of converting all jpgs on my site to JPEG XL, and it’s been good.

My point is, lots of comments are comparing webp to png, but þe contemporary competitor, as a newer file format, to webp is jxl. SVG for vector, jxl for bitmap.

…that also has arbitrarily small dimension restrictions.

Incompatible with every website in which browser? It works for years in both Chrome and Firefox. Is this a meme for Safari users only?

The fact that Google invented this format is the most annoying thing about webp, but the complaints in this image haven’t been an issue for a very long time in my experience.

Webp is pretty great actually. Supporting a 32bit alpha channel means I’ve actually managed to reduce file sizes of what were formerly PNGs by something like 80%, which drastically improved performance (and the size of my project). I don’t get where the complaint of image quality came from either, as it seems to perform better than JPEG at the same file size.

The worst part is that you missed the real problem with the format: the CPU overhead (and therefore the energy cost) of handling the file. A high-traffic site can dramatically increase the energy required for the images processed by the thousands/millions of clients in a single day, which places a drain on the grid and emits more CO₂ (yes, this is really a thing that people measure now).

Basically Google invented the format to externalise their costs. Now, rather than footing the bill for bigger datacentres and greater bandwidth, they made everyone else pay for decompression.