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WebP gave me alpha transparency with lossy images, which came in handy at the time. It was also not bogged down by patents and licensing. Plus like others said, if you support vp8 video, you pretty much already have a webp codec, same with AV1 and avif


Lossy PNGs exist with transparency.


PNG as a format is not lossy, it uses deflate.

What you’re referring to is pngquant which uses dithering/reduces colors to allow the PNG to compress to a smaller size.

So the “loss” is happening independent of the format.


Do you mean lossless? PNGs are not lossy. A large photo with alpha channel in a lossless png could easily be 20x the size of a lossy webp


No I meant lossy. This is the library I use; https://pngquant.org/


Pre-processing does not a codec make (this is why .gif is considered lossless even though you lose all that 24-bit colour goodness)


Fair enough but it gets the job done well none the less.


PNG of course can be lossy. They aren’t great at it, but depending on the image can be good enough.




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