Moderator
Yui
(@fierevere)
永子
1. webp is not yet supported by all browsers
https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp
no IE, no Safari (mobile/desktop)
2. here are plugins that offer this functionality, with fallback for the browsers above.
3. https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ is for such kind of requests, i bet here are already many tickets about webp format.
You can find a live ticket and comment on it.
I will close this topic.
You also need to understand that there are other issues than just support for the format in WordPress.
WordPress doesn’t do any of its image handling itself, it farms this out to the underlying libraries. Specifically, WordPress supports the GD and Imagemagick libraries for image handling.
While these have support for webp, that support is relatively recent, meaning that most hosting systems don’t have the latest versions which have that support built in. So even if WordPress added support for it, without the library support on your host to do all the resizing and other work to those images, nothing would really allow it to work.
Considering that and the lack of browser support for a not-insignificant number of users, webp isn’t gaining any real traction. I know that we all want to use the nice new toys, but WordPress has to work for everybody. This often means supporting the common denominators.
You can follow along with the development in these tickets:
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/35726
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/35725
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/43023
