The article has a warped timeline of WebP, with incorrect speculation, and missing key points.<p>WebP has been created in the rush of wild optimism after Google has freed the VP8 video format (WebM). VP8 has been strategically important for them (and YouTube), because before then Web video has been at mercy of Flash, Silverlight, and threatened by H.264 patent royalties.<p>The WebP format has been rushed. It didn't go through a usual standards process. The VP8 codec turned out to be not so great, especially poor for still images. VP8 has lost to H.264, and meanwhile Cisco has found a loophole to sponsor H.264 royalties for all browsers.<p>Other vendors have rejected WebP, partly because it was a non-standard Google's own thing (uncool move at a time when WHATWG was at its peak), but mainly because it just wasn't good enough, compared to optimized JPEG (Mozilla created MozJPEG to prove the point). Their bar for adoption is very high, since they're worried about maintaining things <i>forever</i>, bug-compatibility issues from a single implementation, increased code size, and attack surface.<p>Mozilla and Safari have been resisting adoption of WebP for about 10 years. They've relented not because WebP got a "stable release" (total nonsense in the article), but because their bug trackers kept getting reports of Chrome-only websites and buggy HTTP content-negotiation that kept serving them "broken" images, to the point it started hurting their compatibility and costing them users.<p>----<p>With AVIF we've had the repeat of the video rush. Web has been once again been threatened by commercial H.265, with even messier and more expensive licensing, and no Cisco loophole this time. Browser vendors have banded around and adopted AV1 format ASAP to prevent dominance of H.265 on the Web.<p>And just like WebP has been riding adoption of VP8, AVIF was riding on adoption of AV1. And once again, a video codec turned ot to be suboptimal for still images. Browsers didn't really care about adopting <i>any</i> image format. They cared about adoption of AV1 video, and AVIF got a pass only because it was almost for "free" (it's basically a 1-frame video file).<p>(BTW, AV1 is based on VP10 + contributions from other vendors. This kinda makes it a descendant of WebP.)<p>So from the perspective of browser vendors not really wanting any new image format, and getting one anyway, and AVIF being good enough to not need an urgent replacement, there's simply no appetite left for adopting yet another format. Browser vendors still don't like adding more code, and are still afraid of compatibility issues and attack surface.<p>The conspiracies about money and power are hilarious.