I don’t know what a .webp file is but I don’t like it. They’re like a filthy prank version of the image/gif you’re looking for. They make you jump through all these hoops to find the original versions of the files that you can actually do anything with.
Edit: honestly I assumed it had something to do with Google protecting themselves from image piracy shit
Just a way for Google to influence and force change on end users away from previously accepted standards, a strategy that allows them to further obfuscate attempts to DRM all media to make sure only authorized parties can play in the sandbox. Don’t worry, they’re trying to move the entire browser that way as well. Mandatory ads and mandatory DRM that can scan your cache and local files for possible violations are coming right goddamn behind it all.
WEBP is effectively a container format warped into a media compression format, it’s strength that’s actively exploited is obviously in saving a little bandwidth by (further) compressing and serving smaller sized cached webp files of existing jpg/png/gif/etc files to end users.
PNG (and JPG for that matter) has worked just fine for static image files for decades, but that was a community project created to work around the patent encumbrance of GIF so there’s not money to be made and nothing to embrace/extend/extinguish by the big patent happy corps by allowing it to retain status as a ‘standard’ in active use. Bandwidth, processing power, and storage have come a long way since PNG started giving us better quality than JPG’s inconsistent compression artifacts.
/waves old man cane around in the air in a threatening manner