May 25, 2023

Has WebP landed yet? (part 3)

I am looking forward to the day that everybody will switch to WebP without fallback. The reason for not changing to WebP-only is Safari, both on desktop and mobile, as you can see in caniuse.

In my last post on WebP, from October ‘22, I reported a 5% usage of Safari 16 (desktop). That number has grown to 60%. That is not yet the 90% I said that was required to convince everybody to change to WebP-only. If we extrapolate the last 7 months (adoption growth of 55%), we still need to wait another 5 months before we can safely use WebP without fallback.

The numbers on mobile are much better as we can see 95% support on Safari there. Bacause of the larger amount of mobile Safari users, this is still almost an equal amount in absolute terms (amount of users). We are talking about 0.7% of all global users on mobile versus 1% of all global users on desktop unable to see your WebP images.

Although these numbers are very low and we currently see a global (estimated) support of 97% for WebP, I think we still need that two percent more before we can safely use WebP without a fallback. Images are too important.

Will that really take another 5 months? Will 2024 be the year that PNG and JPG will be considered legacy formats? In that case my estimate from 2022 was right! I will keep you posted!

()  Joost van der Schee