I'm currently testing the Ai beta export to WebP. The exports are blurry and show more artifacts than a highly compressed JPG. I had to go back to Ps, import the assets and export again to WebP for a high quality result.
My conclusion: It's not ready yet for professional use.

Thanks for the comment, but I feel that's unrelated Jens.

When exporting the WebP through Photoshop, it's much smaller than the WebP exported through Illustrator. That's the point here.

@Aldo Arriage
Not working for Adobe, but the size of your WebP and PNG has very much to do with the type of image you are using. The compression algorithm of PNG makes it so that it is very performant when it comes to images that only have a few colors. The example you provided seems to be a logo with only one color so PNG will have very good compression rates. On the other hand WebP (similar to JPG) is a lot better in compressing images with many different colors (like photos). As to why Photoshop and Illustrator give you different sizes I am not sure since dont know all the settings.

[Reposting as files where not attached before]
Hi Egor and Devs. As I was saying... I saved in WebP format on both Illustrator and Photoshop. The Illustrator WebP (57,8KB) file is bigger than the PNG (12.9KB). To make sure it wasn't the art itself, I opend in Photoshop the WebP saved in Illustrator and saved again as WebP. Photoshop export behaved as usual, with a file size of only 1.31KB.

I'm not sure if it's relevant or devs can dig into it through the output files, but I'm attaching:
- AI file source of Export to WebP
- AI Export to WebP (26.1KB)
- PS file source of Export to WebP (contains the smart object pasted from AI)
- PS Export to WebP (8.19KB)

Hi Egor and Devs. As I was saying... I saved in WebP format on both Illustrator and Photoshop. The Illustrator WebP (57,8KB) file is bigger than the PNG (12.9KB). To make sure it wasn't the art itself, I opend in Photoshop the WebP saved in Illustrator and saved again as WebP. Photoshop export behaved as usual, with a file size of only 1.31KB.

I'm not sure if it's relevant or devs can dig into it through the output files, but I'm attaching:
- AI WEBP
- AI PNG
- PS WEBP

Hello, where can I download illustrator 27.6 ? I don't find it.

It's a great addition! Really happy to see this in the Beta, but it's strange to see that the WebP exports are heavier than the PNGs. This is unexpected.

Egor, In response to your message, it would be great if we could preview the art better before exporting. We often have hairlines around the art that is visible in the legacy preview. Right now we have to export and then preview in another app like photoshop or Apple Preview. It would save time on our end.

Another option that would be great is more granular control of the .jpg compression settings. Right now we can only export at 100, 80, 50 and 20. We find that 60% compression is often the sweet spot between size and quality. Having a user adjustable slider or more presets would be great. It is another reason why we are still using the legacy export.

The new beta features work well but it would be great to have the option to export .webp in the "Save for web (Legacy)" area as well. We use that method of exporting when we only need to save out one or two files. It is a great option to preview the art before exporting.

.webp is 13 years old and is now the standard for the web, makes Adobe Illustrator feel more print-based and limited not being able to export directly to this format

Please give us the ability to export WebP files from Illustrator.

I design webpage layouts in Illustrator. Currently, I have to pull each asset over to Photoshop and export each of them individually in order to save the files as WebP. The ability to batch export Illustrator artboards as WebP files would be amazing and save SO MUCH TIME.

Yes we need this please !

.webp is becoming the default file type for raster graphics. We need the option to export to this format from Illustrator. Having to export .jpegs and then move to Photoshop to generate .webp formats is very inefficient.

We need to be able to export to WEBP format please !

webp is mandatory as more than 25% of websites are made with wordpress, which currently starts the steps to drop jpg in favor of webp

Really want WebP so I don't need to do another step of converting everything that is exported.

I really need WebP support for exporting files for my websites. It's standard for web now and a real pain I have to work around using other methods when it should be a standard feature.

support file heic files like photoshop would be great!

Hi, it would be great if illustrator will support HEIC and WEBP files as linked images. Those two files are always more diffused, and it's not practical to convert it in jpgs everytime i need to import it to my illustrator document.
(This would be helpful in every CC program as well)
Thanks

Please ad webp to the export options!