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Not a failure either

It’s unsupported on the browser that holds 43% of desktop marketshare in central Europe, how is that not a failure?

That doesn't make it a failure.

Google has failed to convince any browser maker not using their entire Blink rendering engine (i.e. Opera) to implement support for WebP. It's been almost seven years, not what I'd call successful.

On the server side, if you're processing images to create multiple versions anyway (thumbnails, different sizes for mobile & desktop, etc.), throwing WebP versions in there is simple enough and should reduce bandwidth use. It's not worth doing if you're not fully automating image handling for other reasons.

Firefox support is coming. Looks like there's been a bit of activity on the ticket:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1294490

I am not well-schooled in this area, but I find it very surprising that webP is not supported on Firefox yet. Am I wrong in being surprised?

It's not hard to use SRCSET to put WebP + JPEG2000 + JPEGXR images which covers Chrome, Safari and IE, and fallbacks for old browsers / FF. Hardly ideal but easy to get pretty good results.

WebM is largely a successful alternative to gif images, why not `pik`?

MP4 I reckon has done even better.