It's a sad story of broken promises. Back when video == Flash, Google bought and opened VP8 codec and got a bunch of companies to promise support for VP8 video.

It's a sad story of broken promises. Back when video == Flash, Google bought and opened VP8 codec and got a bunch of companies to promise support for VP8 video. Back then it made a lot of sense to also have an image format based on exactly VP8 (despite it being a poor fit for still image format), since everyone promised to support it, including hardware acceleration. But Adobe never added VP8 to Flash, hardware support was too little too late. VP8 died, and WebP is burdened with compatibility with a world that never materialized.