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Dealing with Safari and .webp images in 2022

8.9k Views Asked by At

I've been waiting to use .webp images for a very long time.

It's 2022, so, given:

  • the image format has existed for a decade
  • Chrome started supporting .webp in Jan 2014
  • Firefox started supporting .webp in Jan 2019

I decided the day before yesterday to take the plunge and convert a bunch of .png images on a website to .webp images.

Rookie error. Because, of course, I should have checked: https://caniuse.com/webp first and that would have told me that Safari on anything earlier than macOS 11.0 Big Sur (Nov 2020) does not support .webp images.

But I'm tired of waiting. So... Safari can carry on using .png images I suppose.

Because I absolutely do want to serve .webp images to Firefox, Brave, Chrome, Edge, Opera etc. users.

If I were using marked up images, declaring one or more fallback images is elementary:

<picture>
  <source srcset="a-webp-for-most-browsers.webp" type="image/webp">
  <source srcset="a-png-for-safari.png" type="image/png"> 
  <img src="a-png-for-safari.png" alt="My Image">
</picture>

But (sigh) in this instance, the images are CSS background images, so options for creating fallbacks are more limited:

Am I limited to browser-sniffing via PHP, like this:

if (preg_match('/Mac OS X/', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {

  $Body_Element_CSS_Class_List .= ' oh-no-here-comes-safari';
}

Is there a better / more reliable approach I can adopt than browser-detection?

css macos background-image webp browser-detection
Original Q&A
2

There are 2 best solutions below

0
Rounin On BEST ANSWER

Yes, it's hard to provide fallbacks for CSS background-images

In my question I wrote:

If I were using marked-up images, declaring one or more fallback images is elementary [...]

But (sigh) in this instance, the images are CSS background-images, so options for creating fallbacks are more limited

And for now, at least, - ie. while we're still waiting (in 2022) for widespread cross-browser support for the CSS image-set() function - that's true.

But a marked-up <img> can replace each CSS background-image

While I was hunting around for alternative approaches, I unexpectedly came across this July 2021 comment by Quentin Albert:

For what most people use background images for you can nowadays easily use object-fit + object-position.

Source: https://css-tricks.com/using-performant-next-gen-images-in-css-with-image-set/

This was news to me. I was dimly aware of the object-fit CSS property, but I'd never come across the object-position CSS property at all.

But it absolutely works!!

The CSS I would have used if image-set() had support

If image-set() had extensive cross-browser support, this was my intended CSS, which would enable a fallback image for Safari:

.my-image-1 {
  background-image: url(image-set('my-sprited-images.webp', 'my-sprited-images.png'));
  background-position: 0, 0;
}

.my-image-2 {
  background-image: url(image-set('my-sprited-images.webp', 'my-sprited-images.png'));
  background-position: -100px, 0;
}

The HTML + CSS I can use instead (thanks to object-position)

Since the above isn't close to reliable, I can declare the fallback image in HTML instead and position it using object-position:

HTML:

<picture>
  <source srcset="my-sprited-images.webp" type="image/webp">
  <source srcset="my-sprited-images.png" type="image/png"> 
  <img class="my-image-1" src="/my-sprited-images.png" alt="My Image 1">
</picture>


<picture>
  <source srcset="my-sprited-images.webp" type="image/webp">
  <source srcset="my-sprited-images.png" type="image/png"> 
  <img class="my-image-2" src="/my-sprited-images.png" alt="My Image 2">
</picture>

CSS:

.my-image-1 {
  object-position: 0 0;
}

.my-image-2 {
  object-position: -100px 0;
}
2
Matheus Bernardes On

I'm having the same issue, but I believe one good way to solve it for CSS background images today would be to use Modernizr.

In that link you can make a Modernizr script build that specifically verifies for webp support in the browser. Then you just have to add the script to the <head> and it'll add classes to the <html> based on the features you're verifying. So, for instance, to load different image formats for a CSS background image you would do:

.webp .image {
  background-image: url('/image.webp');
}
.no-webp .image {
  background-image: url('/image.png');
}

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