[carra]

Thanks, but just like WEBP I'll try to stick to regular JPEGs whenever possible. Not all programs I use accept these formats, and for a common user JPEG + PNG should mostly cover all needs. Maybe add GIF to the list for simple animations, while more complex ones can be videos instead of images.

[Sammi]

You can really treat WebP as a universally available format in 2026. It is an old, boring, and safe format to use now.

Browser support for WebP is excellent now. The last browser to add it was Safari 14 in September 16, 2020: https://caniuse.com/webp

It got into Windows 10 1809 in October 2018. Into MacOS Big Sur in November 2020.

Wikipedia has a great list of popular software that supports it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP#Graphics_software

[carra]

Unfortunately being universal implies way more than just having good browser support. There are quite a few image processing programs without webp or jpeg-xl support. I'm using Windows 11 and the default image viewer can't even open webp... Also, keep in mind that due to subscription models there are many people stuck with older Photoshop versions too.

[Y-bar]

Webp can be really annoying once you hit certain encoding edge cases.

One customer of mine (fashion) has over 700k images in their DAM, and about 0.5% cannot be converted to webp at all using libwebp. They can without problem be converted to jpeg, png, and avif.

[striking]

"JPEG XL" is a little bit of a misnomer as it's not just "JPEG with more bits". It supports lossless encoding of existing content at a smaller file size than PNG and allows you to transcode existing JPEGs recoverably for a 20% space savings, the lossy encoding doesn't look nearly as ugly and artifacted as JPEG, it supports wide gamut and HDR, and delivers images progressively so you get a decent preview with as little as 15% of the image loaded with no additional client-side effort (from https://jpegxl.info/).

It is at least a very good transcoding target for the web, but it genuinely replaces many other formats in a way where the original source file can more or less be regenerated.

[AlienRobot]

Honestly, I don't like how webp and now jpegxl support both a lossless and lossy mode.

Let's say you want to store images lossless. This means you won't tolerate loss of data. Which means you don't want to risk it by using a codec that will compress the image lossy if you forget to enable a setting.

With PNG there is no way to accidentally make it lossy, which feels a lot safer for cases you want lossless compression.

[ashirviskas]

You should never use GIF anymore, it is super inefficient. Just do video, it is 5x to 10x more efficient.

https://web.dev/articles/replace-gifs-with-videos

[jdiff]

There's odd cases where it still has uses. When I was a teacher, some of the gamifying tools don't allow video embeds without a subscription, but I wanted to make some "what 3D operation is shown here" questions with various tools in Blender. GIF sizes were pretty comparable to video with largely static, less-than-a-second loops, and likely had slightly higher quality with care used to reduce color palette usage.

But I fully realize, there are vanishingly few cases with similar constraints.

[SahAssar]

Videos and images are treated very differently by browsers and OS:es. I'm guessing the better suggestion would be to use apng or animated avif if you are looking for a proper gif alternative.

[account42]

Unfortunately browser vendors didn't want to support silent looping videos in <img> tags so gif stays relevant.

[gsich]

only if looping information is stored inside the container.