Particularly in the context of low-resolution pixelated graphics using a limited color palette, WebP seems a strictly inferior choice to the universally-supported GIF.
I mean all the licensing and incompatibility questions aside, one very cool thing about these newer formats is they (intentionally? unintentionally?) reduce our carbon footprint a little bit, by trying to save delivery costs.
It would be pretty neat if my mac could make a thumbnail of a webp on my desktop, though. I mean without installing software, overriding security policies, or turning it into a developer laptop.
As a concrete comparison, I downloaded the first webp figure on the page, "soft-drop-animation. The webp is 63,250 bytes.
I used imagemagick to convert this file into a gif, resulting in a 119,265 byte file. I then ran the result through gifsicle[0] with maximum compression (-O3) to losslessly optimize it, producing a gif that is 29,711 bytes; less than half of the size of the original webp.
As I noted higher on the comment chain, this usage scenario is particularly favorable to the gif format, while webp might come out ahead for photographic sources.
Is there a good data set on energy requirements for transmission versus compression/decompression of data? Is it really that much in favor of compressed data?
If I follow, you are suggesting that web users protest a format that has been in the public domain for 17 years by instead using a format which has existed for less than 3, and in the process render content inaccessible to anyone not using a bleeding-edge browser?
According to that page, Safari for Mac OS is at least one step behind every major browser except IE. I think it's fair to ask whether the images are broken or the Safari release process is broken.
