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Comment by 0x20cowboy | Hacker News Reader

I hate webp. Not for any legitimate technical reason like, but I often just want to download an image from the web for an image board or drop it in a diagram or ppt or for a joke and nothing works with that format. Nothing. Google image search is useless because of it.

Cmd+shift+4 is now the only way to grab an image out of a browser. Which is annoying.

It has made my life needlessly more complicated. I wish it would go away.

Maybe if browsers auto converted when you dragged ann image out of the browser window I wouldn’t care, but when I see webp… I hate.

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Often (in my experience) WebP is served as a bait-and-switch even if the link ends with .jpg. So I use Curl to fetch the file, and since Curl doesn't send "Accept: image/webp" unless you tell it to, the server just gives you what you ask for.

I once edited Firefox config to make it pretend to not support WebP, and the only site that broke was YouTube.

lol I installed the firefox extension "Don't Accept image/webp" but I assume a lot of sites just ignore it

Webp images are right up there with the fake transparent PNGs you come across in Google Images.

My working model is that WebP images are generally a lossy copy of a PNG or a generation-loss transcoding of a JPG image. I know that lossless WebP technically exists but nobody uses it when they're trying to save bandwidth at the cost of the user.

Even if webp got better support later, I want it deprecated just as revenge for previously wasting my time.

That's true of any new format. Until everything supports it it's not so great. iPhone saves .HEIC which I have to convert to something else to be useful. It's not everywhere (not sure it ever will be).

Windows didn't use to show .jpgs in the window explorer. I know becase I wrote a tool to generate thumbnail HTML pages to include on archive CDs of photos.

To solve this problem, some format has to "win" and get adopted everywhere. That format could be webp, but it will take 3-10 years before everything supports it. It's not just the OS showing it in it's file viewer. It's it's preview app supporting it. It's every web site that lets you upload an image (gmail/gmaps/gchat/facebook/discord/messenger/slack/your bank/apartment-rental-companies, etc..etc..etc..) I just takes forever to get everyone to upgrade.

When does a format stop being new? WebP was introduced fifteen years ago.

When it's widely adopted.

WebP gets pushed into your series of tubes without your consent, and the browser that you're most likely to use to view them just happens to be made by the same company that invented the codec. It's DivX and Real Media all over again.

Worst case you can open it up in Paint and save as JPEG.

Also, I just checked and Powerpoint has no problem dropping in a webp image. Gimp opens it just fine. You are right that web forums are often well behind the times on this.

Worst case you can open it up in Paint and save as JPEG

If he's using ⌘⇧4 to take a screenshot, he probably isn't going to open it in Microsoft Paint.

Total agreement from me, I use this:

bin/webp2png:

    #!/bin/bash
    dwebp "$1" -o  "${1%%.webp}".png

I use ThumbsUp a free utility from https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware to convert webp/heic or whatever inconvenient format.

Just drop the offending image onto the icon in the dock.

On the classic macs they’re was a program called DropDisk. You could drag a disk image to it and it auto mounted it. That suggests a tool for you. Make a desktop app that you can drag and drop images on that converts them to jpeg and saves them in a folder.

You can create this using Automator in a minute.

thumbsup app does exactly this.

If you want to do that so badly and hate webp so much, why not screenshot it? Then you don't have to care what format it's in on the browser

Photoshop has native WebP support now too!

Pretty sure I've managed to configure my Firefoxes to act as webp does not exist...

It's a constant battle though to keep those browser extensions updated, especially since Google decided that extensions cut into their profits and they essentially made them useless.

Exactly, part of being a "superior format" is adoption. Until then, it's just another in a sea of potential.

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