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Comment by dist-epoch | Hacker News Reader

Interesting.

I'm on the other side, I hate webp because if I download such an image a lot of apps don't support it. So typically I need to screenshot it instead to get a usable jpg/png.

Now one more format to hate.

I would say webp/jxl/avif is anti-general compute, since they require very recent software.

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Some people get mad at this reason for hating WebP, but it's so true. The main way in which most people's lives are affected by WebP is that images they download from the web no longer work.

So true. If browsers would just allow users to save images from the web in the user's choice of original, PNG or JPEG format, this would be a huge win. I recall 25 years ago that Internet Explorer, when right-clicking and saving an image, allowed me to save it as whatever it was, or as a .BMP. Somehow that's impossible today??

I know that end-users making memes or whatever aren't a demographic that will matter for adoption, but it seems really weird that this is still a problem on Windows and Mac in 2026. I've searched for browser extensions to no avail.

Copy image puts a bitmap on the clipboard but nobody wants to bloat the menu with saving in alternate formats.

You don't need to bloat any menu. There's already a "Save image as..." context menu option which opens a save dialog. This dialog could have a way to select format.

I just tried it out now, using Waterfox on macOS 27. The save image dialog literally already has a Format dropdown. But I'm guessing it's just a weird part of some native dialog, it lets me select between "WebP Image" and "All Files". This kind of design could've been used to allow the user to save it as a different format than what it was served as.

Personally I get mad at the programmers who sit there not updating their image decoding library for over a decade.

However many decades you wait, libpng is not gonna add support for WebP

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