WebP Overtakes GIF in Bandwidth Served

2022

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Lossy WebP animations land about 64 percent smaller than the GIF equivalent; by 2022 major CDNs were serving more WebP bytes than GIF. Place: Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, and major image-CDN telemetry Figures: the Google WebP team (format released 2010, animated variant 2013) · Safari engineers at Apple Apple ships Safari 14 in September 2020 with WebP support, ten years after Google released the format. The animated WebP variant (introduced 2013) is finally usable across every major browser engine. Average file sizes for equivalent visual quality come in 25-50% smaller than GIF, depending on content. The mechanical case for GIF — universal browser support, no plugin required — is now matched by a smaller and faster competitor. Through 2021 and into 2022, the major image CDNs report a crossover: aggregate WebP bytes served exceed aggregate GIF bytes served. Most users notice nothing; the keyboards on iMessage and WhatsApp still call them GIFs, and most of them, in the back end, increasingly aren't.