WebP by Default on Hold for 6.1 After New Objections From WordPress Lead Developers
Last week Performance team contributors were working on refining their follow-up patches for the multi-mime/WebP feature, after the main work for it was merged into core for 6.1 at the end of July. This includes smaller related items like the shim for non-supporting browsers and adding PDF support, which are being handled in separate tickets. The proposal to generate WebP images by default for new JPEG image uploads has been controversial from the beginning. While the Google-sponsored contributors driving the project have made some revisions after an initial round of significant critical feedback, other contributors have continued to voice concerns that they said were not being considered. Several contributors reported issues with the feature and suggested that it should start by being opt-in, an idea that was summarily dismissed before the main work was committed. Last week, WordPress lead developer Andrew Ozz weighed in on the ticket with new objections: Like @MatthiasReinholz, @eatingrules, and others I think this approach is perhaps lacking. Why would there be twice as many image files taking up a lot of extra space when half of them will never ever be used anywhere? IMHO a better approach would be to just make all image sub-sizes WEBP. If…
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