Google created webp and that is why they are giving it unjustified preferential treatment and has been trying to unreasonably force it down the throat of the internet.
WebP gave me alpha transparency with lossy images, which came in handy at the time. It was also not bogged down by patents and licensing. Plus like others said, if you support vp8 video, you pretty much already have a webp codec, same with AV1 and avif
a better argument might be that chrome protects their own vs a research group in google switzerland, however as other mentioned the security implications of another unsafe binary parser in a browser is hardly worth it
which only strengthens my argument, webp seemed like some ad-hoc pet project in chrome, and that ended like most unsafe binary parsers, with critical vulnerabilities
I now see that webp lossless is definitely from there, but the webp base format looks acquired from a US startup, was the image format also adapted in the swiss group?
You're getting downvoted, but you're not wrong. If anyone else had come up with it, it would have been ignored completely. I don't think it's as bad as some people make it out to be, but it's not really that compelling for end users, either. As other folks in the thread have pointed out, WebP is basically the static image format that you get “for free” when you've already got a VP8 video decoder.
The funny thing is all the places where Google's own ecosystem has ignored WebP. E.g., the golang stdlib has a WebP decoder, but all of the encoders you'll find are CGo bindings to libwebp.
