Estimates are that 95% of Internet users have a browser that supports WebP and that ~25% of the top million websites serve WebP images. I wouldn't call that abysmal.
My webcrawler sucks down a lot of WebP images, at least it did before it got the smackdown from Cloudflare.
Hell, for some software features (like stickers in some chat apps), WebP is mandatory.
HEIFF files, on the other hand...
Photoshop still won’t open it, MacOS preview opens it but then demands to convert it to tiff when you try to edit it
Edit: and good luck uploading the format to the majority of webforms that aren’t faang.
Let’s also not forget the dependency mess that leaves in applications before we do though..
Better image formats serve entities who store images at scale, not end users.
In what other industry would it be considered acceptable to exclude 5% of visitors/users/clients?
See CSS image-set : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image/image...
Rational, or economical? I find it rational to help someone in need since I'd want others to do the same to me, even if it's not financially profitable for me. Imo more factors flow into what's rational, but I understand what you mean by corporate greed working this way (less than 10% of people are blind, neither male nor female, run a free operating system or can't afford a new computer, etc., so yep they're not profitable groups and for-profits don't optimise for that)
Or Linux users? Or even Firefox users in our market?
That's not how it works.
The server declares what versions of media it has, and the client requests a supported media format. The same trick have been used for audio and video for ages too.
Example:
<picture>
<source srcset="a.webp" type="image/webp">
<img src="fallback.jpg">
</picture>Note that I'm looking at "all tracked," which excludes 2% "other" browsers in the data whose featureset is not known.
e.g. cars - not everyone is physically able to drive books - blind people can't read music - deaf people can't hear
It is a form of 80/20 or 90/10 rule the last small percentage costs as much as the majority.
(Also, the parent comment's example is also not so good because as someone else pointed just because the top 25% websites are serving webp it does mean they're not serving alternative formats for those who does not support it, as this is quite trivial to setup)