WebP Browser Support in 2026

For a long time, the honest answer to "can I use WebP?" was "mostly, but check first." In 2026, that caveat has all but disappeared. Here's where support actually stands, and the handful of edge cases still worth knowing about.

The short version: it's safe

Every major browser has supported WebP for years, and the adoption dates tell you how settled this is:

• Chrome, since Chrome 23 in 2012. Every Chromium-based browser (Edge, Brave, Opera) inherits it.
• Firefox: since Firefox 65, January 2019.
• Safari, since Safari 14, September 2020, on both macOS and iOS.
• Every current mobile browser, including Chrome and Safari on phones and tablets.

The youngest of those dates is now more than five years old. caniuse.com tracks global WebP support at over 97% of web traffic, the same tier as PNG and JPEG. In practical terms: if a visitor's browser has received any update in the last five years, it displays WebP.

Where support is still fine but different

Support isn't only about displaying an image in a browser. A few adjacent contexts behave differently:

• Email clients. Rendering engines in email are notoriously conservative. Some still don't reliably show WebP, so for HTML email a well-compressed JPEG or PNG remains the safer choice.
• Social preview scrapers. Most platforms handle WebP now, but if a share preview ever looks blank, a JPEG Open Graph image is the dependable fallback. (Our Social Share Inspector will show you exactly what each platform's scraper sees.)
• Older desktop applications. Certain legacy design, office and enterprise tools still can't open a .webp. This is the most common real-world snag people hit.

The one gotcha you'll actually meet

The situation almost everyone runs into isn't a website failing to show WebP: it's downloading a .webp and finding that a program on your computer won't open it. A design app throws an "unsupported format" error, or a document editor refuses the insert.

The fix is trivial: decode the WebP back to a format that program understands. Drop the file into the WebP Converter, switch to the From WebP direction, and export a PNG (to keep transparency and full quality) or a JPG. The conversion runs on Google's own libwebp codec compiled to WebAssembly, entirely in your browser. No upload, no wait, and the decoded pixels are identical to what the browser itself would render.

Do you still need a fallback?

For a modern website, a fallback is now more belt-and-braces than necessity, but it costs nothing and eliminates any doubt. The �3� element handles it cleanly:

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

The browser uses the WebP where it can and the JPG where it can't. For the rare visitor on ancient software, the image still appears.

Where that leaves you

WebP has effectively won the "can I use it on the web?" question: browser support is universal in every way that matters. The remaining friction lives outside the browser: email, and a shrinking set of legacy desktop apps. Both are easily handled by keeping a JPEG or PNG on hand and converting between formats whenever you need to.

Use WebP freely for the web, keep a fallback where it's cheap, and convert back out the moment some old tool insists on it. If you're planning a site-wide switch, the companion guide walks through the whole process: Convert to WebP for a faster website.

Sources

• WebP image format support tables (caniuse.com)
• An image format for the Web (Google WebP documentation)
• �4� element (MDN Web Docs)