Find one of your favorite GIFs on Giphy and download it. You might be surprised that the result saved to your device won't be a GIF. It'll be an animated WebP.
It’s a very intentional move by Giphy, citing the maximization of quality and reduction in load times. After all, we're in a time when page performance has prominent focus in the industry, especially after Google unveiled its Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. Coupled with the fact that WebP has extremely good browser support, the move shouldn't be all that surprising.
Still, moving away from the GIF hits different. The format's become such a big part of meme culture, and has been responsible for ripping apart friendships over the correct pronunciation. It's hard to imagine a world in which GIFs... aren't actually GIFs.
But in context of the web, it makes a lot of sense to fully embrace WebP as an alternative, even with the complicated feelings that linger around it.
A Brief History of the GIF
Believe it or not, the motivation behind the invention of the GIF had nothing to do with looping animations. It was all about performance. Back in 1987 (before the web was even a thing), CompuServe's Steve Wilhite & team needed a way to save, share, and render images without hogging a computer's RAM or storage.
The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) was the result. It sported a relatively efficient compression algorithm, it could access 256 distinct colors per frame, and it could even contain multiple frames in a single file.
This was all big deal at the time, but the animated GIFs we're more familiar with didn't hit the scene until 1995, when Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released. It was the first browser that supported looping GIF animations, leading to some interesting, now-vintage web art. If you'd like to relive some of them yourself, check out GifCities. You'll find some gems:
Since then, the GIF has been through a lot, including some fierce licensing fights that nearly ended its role on the internet in the late 90s.
But soon enough, it intersected with a growth of meme culture and the explosion of digital connectedness. It quickly emerged as the preferred format for sending bite-sized, animated media between people. And that set up GIF platforms like Tenor and Giphy to thrive.
Times (and Tech) Have Changed
The technical implications of the GIF were significant at the time, but today, the landscape is different, and there’s a really good alternative available: WebP. Among the benefits:
Significantly broader color depth.
The GIF supports a maximum of 256 colors. WebP, however, touts a depth of 24 bits, which amounts to 16.7 million colors, meaning you're able to produce far more vibrant; detailed images than before.
More efficient (and flexible) compression.
Lempel–Ziv–Welch, the compression algorithm behind the GIF, is an old, straighftforward, and reliable one. But it's not the most efficient, it isn't suited for datasets with repetitive data, and it sometimes gets hairy due to licensingrestrictions.
WebP, on the other hand, was born out of the VP8 video format and uses a more modern compression approach. Both lossy & lossless compression is supported, making it more flexible than its legacy counterpart as well, depending on your needs. To put it plainly, WebP was built for image animations.
Smaller file size.
Aside from all of that, another big advantage over GIF is the file size reduction for most images. On average, lossy WebP animations are 64% smaller, while lossless versions are 19% smaller. Given the amount of imagery on the web, widespread mobile connectivity, and the SEO implications, this is no trivial benefit.
Still, Some Vehement Resistance
Search for "WebP" on Reddit, and you're going to see a lot of this:
It's all over X too:
The nerds of the world might respect WebP for its technical advantages, but we're in a bubble. The rest of realityvehemently hates it. That's largely because of compability issues with software that's not the web. If you download an animated WebP in the Windows Photos app, for example, it won't play. You'll just get a still. Especially when the format was still relatively new, I could see that being pretty annoying if you're one to right-click + download lots of pictures from online.
But at this point, I suspect much of that hatred is riding the momentum of the cultural bandwagon. It's cool to hate on WebP, much like it is Bootstrap, Internet Explorer, or PHP. In addition to the fact that software is still rapidly moving to support animated WebPs, legitimate criticism is thin, at least for the vast majority of use cases on the web.
Just Do It Already
The reactionary defense of the GIF makes sense given the cultural role it's enjoyed. But the technical benefits alone are quickly eroding any effort to resist modern formats like WebP.
Particularly for the web, straight-up moving from GIF to WebP offers very few (if any) downsides. There's some work involved in manually converting images yourself, but solutions exist for automating the entire process as well – without even changing your image URLs (hard plug: consider PicPerf.io).
If you’re serving GIFs on your website, consider the move. For all the reasons mentioned here, may be well-worth the effort.
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