Ask HN: Do you use WebP without a fallback yet?

#1

Post by brundolf » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 8:36 PM UTC

Is browser support good enough? We have important images that are shown using background-image for responsiveness, which means we can’t really do a fallback mechanism

Re: Ask HN: Do you use WebP without a fallback yet?

#2

Post by moxylush » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

I think it depends on your intended audience. I've use it without a fallback and without consequence because my visitors almost always use evergreen browsers.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use WebP without a fallback yet?

#3

Post by 1123581321 » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

We use it without fallback where development budget is low and the audience is mostly up to date and/or predominantly mobile.

For everything else, it’s easy to either generate webp alternates to jpeg/png and use a picture element (for non-responsive srcset, only three inner elements are required for this), or to use Cloudflare or an image CDN that automatically serves webp. Usually a project that requires a framework or SaaS that can’t easily support one can use the other.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use WebP without a fallback yet?

#4

Post by brundolf » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

1123581321 wrote: post #3

We use it without fallback where development budget is low and the audience is mostly up to date and/or predominantly mobile. For everything else, it’s easy to either generate webp alternates to jpeg/png and use a picture element (for non-responsive srcset, only three inner elements are required for this), or to use Cloudflare or an image CDN that automatically serves webp. Usually a project that requires a framework…

Hadn’t thought about doing it at the CDN level; guess that would work for backgrounds too, huh

Re: Ask HN: Do you use WebP without a fallback yet?

#5

Post by forgotmypw17 » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 10:19 AM UTC

Heck no, I support ANY BROWSER going back to Netscape 2.0+ and IE3+ )))

Not joking, either.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use WebP without a fallback yet?

#6

Post by favourable » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 3:42 PM UTC

Well there's a polyfill if you need it: https://github.com/chase-moskal/webp-hero

As others have said: if the bulk of your traffic is people using the latest hardware, then polyfills are probably overkill. If you need to cater for more niche target audience using legacy hardware, then by all means, use polyfills.