WebP
Google's bet that made the web 30% lighter.
Where it came from
Google announced WebP in 2010, deriving the codec from the VP8 video encoder it had acquired with On2 Technologies. The pitch: same visual quality as JPEG at 25–35% less size.
Adoption was slow — Firefox waited until 2020, Safari until 2020 (iOS 14). Today it's universally supported and powers a large share of web images.
How it works
WebP has two personalities: lossy mode uses VP8 intra-frame coding (predictive blocks + DCT residuals), while lossless mode uses a completely different transform designed for exact reproduction.
It also supports alpha transparency even in lossy mode — something JPEG never managed — plus animation.
For screenshots and UI, WebP-lossless usually beats PNG by 20–30%; for photos, WebP-lossy beats JPEG similarly.
Convert WebP images
Drop a WebP into the studio to turn it into PNG/JPEG for older tools, or convert your PNGs to WebP to save bandwidth.