[johnklos]

Tangential rant: Why are so many sites these days so Google-centric? All the world isn't a modern computer and/or running Chrome. webp is not a universal standard yet.

Are hosting services that allow serving different files based on user agent really that hard to find? Or has everyone just drank the Google Flavor Aid?

[josephcsible]

WebP is a standard. And serving different files to different user agents makes the problem you're describing worse, not better.

[johnklos]

It's a standard, but it isn't a universal standard. Know the difference.

Until a standard has both been accepted by a significant majority, and there has been plenty of time for the standard to be adopted, it's bad to simply turn on a feature and say, "screw you" to everyone who has an older device or computer that can't run the latest software.

Serving different files to different user agents is not desirable, sure, but it's better than this crap - have the latest or it doesn't work. You know this, I think.

So is it that people are shitty and elitist, or is that people are just ignorant? If the former, then we can't change that - people will be shitty if they choose to be shitty. Sounds like you advocate for that.

If people are just ignorant about the fact that their web site doesn't work on older phones, tablets, Macs, or older non-Chrome browsers, then they should be told.

[josephcsible]

It isn't just the Chromium monoculture that supports WebP, though. Firefox and Safari both do too. What other browsers do you want to support it before you'll consider it universal?

And for people with operating systems too old to run any browser version that supports WebP, they're also way behind on security updates, so we should be encouraging them to upgrade to a newer OS.