In light of the meme and reactions noted in the Share Your Linux Memes thread, I wanted to explore the reasons some might have for the WebP hate.
I’m well familiar with codecs and various image / sound and video formats, professionally working in multimedia and web development for decades. I’ve seen the problems closed standards can bring (eg: GIF, Flash, AAC, H.264, H.265, etc).
Why are new open image format options, like WebP and AVIF receiving “hate”?
Some image viewers/editors don’t play well with WebP and AVIF. Many (most?) websites don’t except either format as upload options for sharing or avatars.
I just find the formats annoying. PNG (JPG/JPEG in a pinch) is just fine and are accepted everywhere and easy to work with.
I’m all for open source file types, but the world isn’t.
Google’s idea with WebP is a great one — one file type to rule them all. But like above, it’s not well-supported and ends up being more of an annoyance than anything else.
That said, I do see it one day becoming well-supported, and I can’t wait for that.
Long term: Excellent
Short term: Annoying
What’s that study about instant gratification again? 
Adding to this: I think the reason for the lack of adoption is because it involves the wider population. The reason I say this is that .OBJ, .USD, etc. don’t have this issue, with .USD being fairly recent.
Why? Because artists/designers are more willing and used to making changes or doing things differently, since it’s sometimes a requirement of their industries.
I see. So not an issue with the formats themselves so much, rather an issue of the support they currently have, or more importantly, don’t have.
I had thought WebP was fairly universally adopted now (96.83% on caniuse.com), at least as far as browser support is concerned. IE11 drags that figure down, but seriously IE11 users, get with the program 
App and website specific support may still be lagging and as a web-developer, I can understand the hesitancy to adopt too quickly, at risk of cutting out a part of your visitor base. It’s entirely possible to integrate backwards compatibility though (and I do), but it does involve at least some effort and if to be automated, some server support (imagemagick / gd versions etc).
Even AVIF browser support is progressing nicely. It doesn’t look like either is going to meet the same demise as JPEG 2000 or JPEG XR at least.
I would have liked to see JPEG XL gain more support as another new and worthy open standard. It’s lagging behind a bit, but there are still some fairly recent mentions suggesting future support in both Chrome and Firefox.
i wasn’t aware there was any hate for webp.
Between “can I use” number of 90% and the effective spread of it, being used on only 14 % of websites in total, is a very big difference.
To me it doesn’t make that much of a difference. But for real production standards. The limitation to 8 bit color depth would render it as being too limited. Except for web publishing purposes, as it’s name already implies. Even if I’m not a professional photographer. If i take that effort to take my images in a semi-lossless '.raw format in 10bit color depth, I’ld choose an image format which won’t restrict me to 8 bit depth of color.
As you said, AVIF is progressing nicely. Google discontinued further efforts and didn’t even intend to release the experimental version of WebP 2 as a successor.
Still, I don’t like the aspect that WebP as well as AVIF are including animation support in their standard.
*.gif ain’t dead yet 
Yeah I suspect that’s the “is it safe to use yet?” hesitancy, which is relatable.
I agree where WebP is concerned. As you’ve noted, it’s a final web format. Data is extensively discarded (when not lossless and not already 8-bit/channel colour depth), for the purpose of file-size optimisation. Raw and intermediate formats have no comparison here.
AVIF may eventually offer something to that area though, supporting both lossless compression and according to this source at least, up to 16-bits per channel and layer support. That means it’s rubbing shoulders with TIFF, and above what common raw formats support, although I wouldn’t be making a habit of converting from raw to any format (just keep the native raw), but it might be applicable as an intermediate format.
I have very recently noticed some client support issues with animation. Still a work in progress. Also a heavy user of GIFs 
WebP and AVIF are the still image counterparts of VP8 and AV1 video codecs respectively. So I’m not sure it’s “adding” animation, or just leaving a modified version of it in
It’s starts with the usual friction on the provider side:
So the end-user is presented with a multi-year experience of “not supported here”. That’s probably where “the hate” starts.
To hit more at home: Recently I saw every image thumbnail in Dolphin except WebP on a new installation. What went wrong? You need qt6-imageformats, which isn’t even listed as an optional dependency. That was a fun little 10 minutes adventure. The little things.
PS: That said, how about we enable avif image upload in this forum? 