WebP Browser Support Guide: Which Browsers Support WebP in 2026?

WebP is now supported by over 97% of all browsers in use worldwide. For most projects, you can use WebP without a fallback and reach virtually every user. But the details matter — some older corporate environments still run legacy browsers, and some edge cases still require JPEG or PNG. Here's the complete picture for 2026.

Which browsers support WebP?

All modern browsers have supported WebP for years. Here's the breakdown:

• Chrome: full support since version 23 (2012). All versions in use today support WebP.
• Firefox: full support since version 65 (January 2019).
• Safari: full support since version 14 (September 2020, iOS 14 / macOS Big Sur). Older Safari does not support WebP.
• Edge: full support since Edge 18 (Chromium-based Edge, 2020).
• Internet Explorer: never supported WebP. IE11 market share is under 0.5% globally as of 2026.
• Samsung Internet: full support since version 4 (2016).
• Opera: full support since version 11.1 (2012).

Animated WebP support

Animated WebP (a WebP alternative to animated GIF) has broader support than static WebP, as it arrived slightly later. Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari (14+) all support animated WebP. IE11 does not. For animated images with full browser coverage, use the <picture> element with a GIF fallback.

Alpha channel (transparency) support

WebP with an alpha channel (lossy or lossless transparency) is supported in every browser that supports WebP. This is one of WebP's key advantages over JPEG — you get transparency like PNG at much smaller file sizes.

Should you still use a fallback?

For consumer-facing websites: no. In 2026, a WebP-only image strategy misses fewer than 3% of users worldwide. For enterprise or government applications where users may be on corporate lockdown with IE11 or heavily outdated Chrome installs, a JPEG fallback is still worth adding.

The standard HTML fallback pattern uses the <picture> element:

<picture>
<source srcset="image.webp" type="image/webp" />
<img src="image.jpg" alt="description" />
</picture>

Browsers that support WebP use image.webp. Browsers that don't fall back to image.jpg. No JavaScript required.

WebP vs JPEG: when to use each

• Use WebP for any image on a website where load time matters. WebP is typically 25–35% smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality, and 60–80% smaller than PNG for photographic content.
• Use JPEG for compatibility with older software, print workflows, or when you need maximum compatibility in email (Outlook still does not support WebP).
• Use PNG for images that need lossless quality (screenshots, diagrams) where you can't use WebP.

Email clients and WebP

This is the major exception: most desktop email clients don't support WebP. Outlook on Windows renders JPEG and PNG but not WebP. Apple Mail on macOS supports WebP (Safari engine). Gmail web supports WebP. Use JPEG for email campaigns to guarantee compatibility.

Converting images to WebP

If you're moving a site to WebP, use our Image Converter to batch-convert JPEG and PNG images to WebP. The converter runs entirely in your browser — no server upload required — and lets you set the quality level to balance file size against visual quality.

Why WebP adoption took a decade

Google shipped WebP support in Chrome back in 2010, but universal coverage took a full ten years. Firefox held out until version 65 in January 2019, after long debate about whether the web needed another image format. Safari came last: version 14 added WebP in September 2020, with one important caveat — on macOS, decoding was tied to the operating system, so Safari 14 only displayed WebP when running on Big Sur or newer. Microsoft closed the final gap the same year when it rebuilt Edge on Chromium. This timeline explains why so many tutorials written before 2020 treat WebP fallbacks as mandatory: the advice was correct then, and is outdated now.

Accept header negotiation: the server-side alternative

The <picture> element isn't the only fallback mechanism. Every browser that supports WebP announces it in the Accept request header (image/webp), so a server or CDN can quietly serve a WebP or JPEG version of the same URL depending on who's asking. Many image CDNs and optimization proxies do this automatically. The advantage is that you don't touch a single line of markup — it also covers CSS background images, which <picture> can't. The trade-off is infrastructure: your cache must send Vary: Accept so the two versions don't get mixed up. As a rule of thumb, use <picture> when you control the HTML of a handful of templates, and Accept negotiation when you have thousands of existing pages or a CMS you can't edit. Either way you'll need WebP files to serve — our PNG to WebP and JPG to WebP converters handle the batch conversion in your browser.

Checking WebP support in code

To detect WebP support in JavaScript:

const supportsWebP = document.createElement('canvas')
.toDataURL('image/webp').startsWith('data:image/webp')

In practice, you almost never need this in 2026. The <picture> element handles fallback declaratively, and Next.js, Nuxt, and most modern frameworks auto-convert images to WebP during build.