WebP browser support in 2026 — is it safe to use everywhere?

WebP has been around since 2010 when Google first released it. For years, Safari's lack of support made it impractical as a primary format. That changed with Safari 14 (September 2020), and in 2026, WebP is finally universally safe.

Current browser support

| Browser | WebP support since | Global usage share | | ---------------- | ------------------ | ------------------ | | Chrome | v17 (2012) | ~65% | | Firefox | v65 (2019) | ~3% | | Safari | v14 (2020) | ~18% | | Edge | v18 (2018) | ~5% | | Samsung Internet | v4.0 (2016) | ~3% | | Opera | v11 (2012) | ~2% |

Total support: ~97% of global browser traffic. The remaining 3% is primarily very old mobile browsers and Opera Mini in proxy mode.

What about the remaining 3%?

The browsers that don't support WebP are:

• IE11: End of life, less than 0.1% of traffic
• Old Android WebView: Pre-2016 Android versions
• Opera Mini (extreme mode): Server-side rendering, ~1% of traffic

For these users, use the <picture> element with a JPEG fallback:

<picture>
  <source srcset="photo.webp" type="image/webp" />
  <img src="photo.jpg" alt="..." width="800" height="600" />
</picture>

Or, if you're comfortable with 97% coverage, just use WebP directly:

<img src="photo.webp" alt="..." width="800" height="600" />

WebP in email

This is where WebP still falls short. Outlook on Windows does not support WebP, and Outlook has significant market share in corporate environments. For email, stick with JPEG and PNG.

See our email image formats guide for details.

WebP in native apps

• iOS: Supported since iOS 14 (2020)
• Android: Supported since Android 4.0 (2011)
• macOS: Supported since macOS 11 Big Sur (2020)
• Windows: Supported via the WebP codec from the Microsoft Store

For mobile apps, WebP is safe to use as the primary format.

WebP vs AVIF

If WebP is universally supported, why bother with AVIF? Because AVIF produces files 30–40% smaller than WebP at equivalent quality. For a site serving millions of images, that bandwidth difference is significant.

However, AVIF encoding is 5–10× slower and support is at ~94% (missing in older Safari and some mobile browsers). The pragmatic approach:

1. AVIF as primary with WebP fallback for maximum savings
2. WebP as the sole format for simplicity
3. JPEG only if you need email compatibility

Converting to WebP

You can convert any image to WebP in seconds — drop a file, select WebP as the output format, and download. The conversion happens entirely in your browser.

For batch conversion, drop up to 10 images at once and download them all as a ZIP.