Outside of photographers, how many people are looking at super high-resolution images on the web? Even images that might have high-resolution versions are usually converted to a shrunken image 600px wide to fit inside the website's theme scaffolding.
Is that really even worth shaving 15% off the file size? If bandwidth matters, websites should look to reduce the volume of useless stock images littering their templates.
WebP seems like a gift to Cloudflare and the other companies that do the heavy lifting of caching and serving millions of images across multiple sites. For users, it's at best indistinguishable from JPEG, and at worst an obstruction to saving images from the web.
Honestly, I would have agreed wholly with you until I spend 1 month volunteering in Kiribati. 2/3G is the norm there and even few KBs would make a difference. It reminded me a lot of my childhood with 28/56k modems :/
Additionally, I believe countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, ... are in similar situation infrastructure wise (please correct me if I am wrong) and so for 1/2B people would benefit from a slimmer web.
Is that really even worth shaving 15% off the file size? If bandwidth matters, websites should look to reduce the volume of useless stock images littering their templates.
WebP seems like a gift to Cloudflare and the other companies that do the heavy lifting of caching and serving millions of images across multiple sites. For users, it's at best indistinguishable from JPEG, and at worst an obstruction to saving images from the web.