Opera web evangelist Bruce Lawson has advocated the format, largely because of its potential to slow rapid growth in web page weight, of which images comprise about 60 per cent. Speaking to .net, Lawson worried that "pages continue to get a lot bigger while many users move to mobile," often on relatively slow connections. Lawson continued to add that images are also often inadequately compressed.
Although Google's statistics on WebP appear impressive, we put it to Lawson that there were still hurdles regarding the format's widespread use due to a lack of support across browsers and software. "Well, there are free plug-ins for Photoshop and GIMP, and Google's released a plug-in for Windows," he countered. "And on browsers, CSS enables fallbacks for background images, although we do need something like the 'picture' element for multiple inline image sources."
Mobile strategist Jason Grigsby was more cautious: "Right now, if companies are providing a central image resizing service, it probably makes some sense to look into WebP. But you have to be able to detect browser support and replace the image because you can't rely on browsers to support it yet. It sounds good in theory, but first let's see if other browsers decide to support it."
WebP: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/
