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Comment by krasin | Hacker News Reader

For me, the last straw was Chrome's insistence on saving JPEG images from the Internet as WEBP. That just plainly corrupts the data without my consent.

Edit: as pointed out below, it is probably CDNs to blame, not Chrome. Sorry for a false alarm (still going to continue using Firefox, though).

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Lots of image "optimizing" CDNs will return WEBP images even if the URL specifies JPG, as long as the browser indicates support in the Accept header. As far as I know Chrome (nor Firefox) will "convert" images from one format to another when saving, so if Chrome is saving images as WEBP, it's because that's what the website is serving you, even if the URL say it's a JPG.

That could be. Thanks!

I've never experienced this behavior, but I see people do mention it online. I also just tried to save a JPEG image, and Chrome offered to save it as JPEG.

Could it be that the web page offered different formats and Chrome chose WebP? Developers can do this now:

    <picture>
        <source srcset="some-image.webp" type="image/webp">
        <source srcset="some-image.jpg" type="image/jpeg">
        <img src="some-image.jpg" alt="...">
    </picture>

If Chrome chose to display the WebP image, that's what it will offer to save even if the <img> tag points to the JPEG version.

Firefox seems to do this also, but not consistently.

I think that's when the server returns WebP.

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