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Comment by reddalo | Hacker News Reader

The article only briefly mentions the real problem: outside of browsers, proper support for .webp files is very, very low. That's why JPEG is still king and probably still be for a long time.

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WebP seems pretty widely supported to me - on Windows at least, Explorer shows thumbnails for them, Paint can open them, other editors like Paint.NET have built-in support... I haven't come across software that doesn't support WebP for a while.

Google Docs, of all things, does not support webp. Preview on Mac can open it but not edit. Those are my two most common use cases.

I celebrated the anniversary of the (internal) bug asking for SVG support in Google slides. I think it's up to 15 years now?

So, uh, don't get your hopes up.

Well SVGs I understand being harder to support, those aren't really images. And various anti-injection security rules treat it as untrusted HTML code.

There is a workaround for using SVG in Google Slides by using Google Drive to convert to EMF (a format I’ve never heard of anywhere else). It’s a pain, though.

https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/115814/how...

Huh, first I've heard of EMF too.

It seems so strange to me that it is this hard to add: I wrote a userscript recently to extract titles from slides and if I recall Google slides already renders in an svg format. Wondering what's going on here.

Right so on Linux/KDE.

Is missing WebP support a meme?

Yep, on Gnome we have both eog and GIMP that support webp completely, and have for many years. I don't think I've even tried with other apps but haven't needed to. I didn't even realize this was a problem for some platforms

Case in point, DaVinci Resolve. Incredibly popular with people creating videos for YouTube and TikTok, still doesn't support webp in 2025.

This becomes an issue if you're creating content about trending topics, since lots of marketing sites love using webp for every image.

if I want to even download webp and look at the file I need to convert it. barely functional in basic image galleries outside of mobile?

Sometimes you upload a jpeg, they convert it to webp, and then don't allow uploading webps.

I had uploaded lossless webp images, the 3rd party site cached the images from my server and re-encoded them as lossy format of a higher file size and lower fidelity.

They'll do that to large PNGs too.

in software made in the past decade? seems unlikely

Also missing from popular browsers is support for the new JPEG XL format.

https://caniuse.com/jpegxl

Looks like a mixture of runtime and compiler flags are needed except for Safari.

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