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Last month, the plan for WordPress to generate WebP images by default for new JPEG image uploads was put on hold for the upcoming 6.1 release after objections from lead developers. The original proposal had been merged into core at the end of July, despite significant critical feedback and concerns from WordPress’ developer community. Yesterday, the feature was reverted in response to Matt Mullenweg’s recent post about removing it from core in favor of development as a canonical plugin:
I’ve been reading through all the conversation and issues here. I am interested in supporting new formats and improving performance, but I think this change being pushed by default to users when they upgrade to 6.1 is a lot for right now, including with some of the clunky interactions OSes still have around webp (and HEIC!) files.
I’m happy for support for working for webp and HEIC files to stay in core, as we should be liberal in what we accept and work with, but not with the change to convert everything to webp when JPEGs are uploaded.