WebM is an open, royalty-free audiovisual container format Google introduced in 2010, purpose-built to keep web media, video, audio, and animated content, smaller and faster-loading than older formats without a meaningful visible quality loss.
It's most often used today as a lighter, more efficient replacement for animated GIFs specifically: a WebM video loop can deliver the same visual effect at a fraction of the file size a GIF would need, since GIF's compression is genuinely outdated technology by modern standards. Browser support is broad across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, though it's worth pairing with a fallback format for the rare browser or context that doesn't support it, particularly for content that has to render reliably everywhere rather than just on modern, mainstream browsers. For any page carrying looping background video, product demo clips, or other short video content where file size genuinely matters to load time, WebM is generally worth the format switch over older, heavier alternatives.
