The Story of the WebP Image Format

A format born from video encoding

In September 2010, Google released WebP. Its origin is unusual: Google acquired the video-encoding company On2 Technologies in 2009, gaining the VP8 video codec. Engineers noticed that VP8's intra-frame compression — compressing a single frame — worked just as well on still images. So WebP was born: essentially "video-encoding ideas applied to a still picture."

The payoff was immediate: at the same visual quality, WebP files are typically 25%–34% smaller than JPEG, a huge win for page load speed.

Three key milestones

WebP did not become popular overnight. It hit a series of important checkpoints:

• 2010 — Released with lossy compression only; Chrome adopted it first.
• 2011 — Gained lossless compression and alpha (transparency) support, keeping PNG's capabilities with smaller files (lossless WebP is on average about 26% smaller than PNG).
• 2013 — Added animation, a modern alternative to GIF; that same year Google pledged royalty-free licensing for VP8 patents, removing commercial concerns.

The final mile: browser support

For a long time, the biggest weakness of WebP was incomplete browser support. That changed in recent years:

• Chrome led the way from 2010;
• Firefox 65 (2019) added native support;
• Safari 14 (2020) supported lossy WebP;
• Safari 16 (2022) completed support for lossless and animation.

Today WebP works in nearly 100% of mainstream browsers. In 2023 Google also unveiled the experimental WebP2, yet WebP remains the most widely used modern web image format.

In summary

WebP's journey is a story of format and ecosystem reinforcing each other: file-size advantages attracted developers, browsers then closed the compatibility gap one by one, and WebP became the default choice for web image performance. The simplest way to understand it is to make your first conversion.