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Comment by paulbeattie | Hacker News Reader

Why is this even a news story? Surely if anything we should be praising the use of a new and arguably beneficial image format rather than complaining about some users incompetence to grab a view to open it on their computer.

It really seems such a bizarre thing to be complaining about. Facebook could make it a little easier by having a download as jpeg image option as well.

The world is always moving forward, why don't we just go back to bitmaps!

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People care about pictures which are important to them. They don't care about the encoding scheme currently in vogue or reducing Facebook's bandwidth bill by a small percentage at a significant interoperability and thus usability hit. The average computer user has been able to use “Save As” on images for every image they've every seen online with little question that the result will work with their local applications – until now.

The most charitable way I can describe your decision to blame the user is poorly considered. I would like to see new formats catch on but early adopters have to assume responsibility for the growing pains – Facebook making the trivial effort required to make their download link more prominent is about as easy as it gets.

WebP is a pretty "meh" format. The improvements it offers are, at best, very marginal.

Given the large amount of work required for widespread adoption of new image formats, the effort would be better spent on better formats.

[E.g. (and I'm no fan of MS) MS's new image format, JPEG XR†, which seems vastly superior to WebP in almost every way—it actually does have compelling new features.]

† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XR

Not sure why it's news, but it is definitely an interesting thing to consider for web developers. Serving people WebM in contexts where they might want to save the file will be surprisingly problematic.

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