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Comment by michaelbrave | Hacker News Reader

I personally don't much care for the format, if I save an image and it ends up WebP then I have to convert it before I can edit or use it in any meaningful way since it's not supported in anything other than web browsers. It's just giving me extra steps to have to do.

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Ironically, even Google's products like Slides don't support webp images. But if/when it gets more support, I guess it's fine. I can tolerate a new format once every 20 years.

.webm can go away, though.

WebP is already deprecated from a compression ratio standpoint - it's entirely surpassed by all of AVIF, HEIF, and JXL. Too bad that none of these has broad support (and the best of them, JXL, is being blocked by all browser makers).

WebM on the other hand still has a reason to exist unfortunately: patents on H.264.

JXL is supported in Safari, and Mozilla just put out a post saying they'll add support if someone will write a Rust decoder, and (bizarrely) Google has agreed to supply one.

So there is a small chance Google will reverse the removal from Chrome.

Takes 2 seconds (literally, on macOS it's in the right click menu) to convert and it's smaller so not really a problem

Conversion means additional quality loss unless you are converting to a lossy format. Better solution would be to use reasonable tools that are not stuck in the stone age and can open WebP directly.

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