[archerx]

Google created webp and that is why they are giving it unjustified preferential treatment and has been trying to unreasonably force it down the throat of the internet.

[adzm]

WebP gave me alpha transparency with lossy images, which came in handy at the time. It was also not bogged down by patents and licensing. Plus like others said, if you support vp8 video, you pretty much already have a webp codec, same with AV1 and avif

[archerx]

Lossy PNGs exist with transparency.

[breppp]

unjustified preferential treatment over jpegxl a format google also had created

[archerx]

They helped create jpegXL but they are not the sole owner like they are with webp. There is a difference.

[MrDOS]

You're getting downvoted, but you're not wrong. If anyone else had come up with it, it would have been ignored completely. I don't think it's as bad as some people make it out to be, but it's not really that compelling for end users, either. As other folks in the thread have pointed out, WebP is basically the static image format that you get “for free” when you've already got a VP8 video decoder.

The funny thing is all the places where Google's own ecosystem has ignored WebP. E.g., the golang stdlib has a WebP decoder, but all of the encoders you'll find are CGo bindings to libwebp.

[archerx]

I noticed Hacker news is more about feelings than facts lately which is a shame.