WebP

WebP is a raster graphics developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency. Google announced the WebP format in September 2010, and released the first stable version of its supporting library in April 2018. WebP was first announced by Google on 30 September in 2010 as a new open format for lossy compressed true-color graphics on the web, producing files that were smaller than JPEG files for comparable image quality. It was based on technology which Google had acquired with the purchase of On2 Technologies. As a derivative of the VP8 video format, it is a sister project to the WebM multimedia container format. WebP-related software is released under a BSD free software license. On 3 October 2011, Google added an "Extended File Format" allowing WebP support for animation, , XMP and Exif metadata, and tiling (compositing very large images from maximum 16383×16383 tiles). Tiling support was never finalized and was removed from the spec again. Older animated GIF files can be converted to animated WebP. On 18 November 2011, Google announced a new lossless compression mode, and support for transparency (alpha channel) in both lossless and lossy modes; support was enabled by default in libwebp 0.2.0 (16 August 2012). According to Google's measurements in November 2011, a conversion from PNG to WebP resulted in a 45% reduction in file size when starting with PNGs found on the web, and a 28% reduction compared to PNGs that are recompressed with pngcrush and PNGOUT. In July 2016, Apple added WebP support to early beta versions of macOS Sierra and iOS 10, but support was later removed in the GM seed versions of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra released in September 2016. In September 2020, WebP support was added in Safari version 14. The supporting libwebp library reached version 1.0 in April 2018. As of November 2021, web browsers that support WebP had 96% market share.