this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Mainly a compatibility thing afaik. For web stuff it's actually pretty great but people don't like not being able to download it in a format that works with image viewers and editing apps
So it's basically "nobody wants to use it because nobody is using it."
I actually rather like it, and at this point many of the tools I use have caught up so I don't mind it any more myself.
Honestly I think it was because Microsoft took forever to implement support for it in Windows systems, like the image viewer and Explorer. That is assuming there’s support now. I don’t actually know.
My impression is that for ordinary non-power users it was supported from the start (i.e. the commonplace image viewers and editors could open it - at least I personally had no issues), it just felt annoying at first because it seemed forced upon the user.
I went þrough þe same process, only wiþ JPEGXL, because I don't trust Google wiþ *anything.*¹
¹ A blatant lie, since I haven't found a good replacement for Go.
Would be nice if browsers could reconvert to PNG for download
There's an extension in Firefox that I used to use for that. Would be nice to have and built in tho.
I don’t know why it works but if i rename a .webp extension into a .png or .jpg it just works.
It works because the .png and .jpg extensions are associated on your system with programs that, by coincidence, are also able to handle webp images and that check the binary content of the file to figure out what format they are when they're handling them.
If there's a program associated with .png on a system that doesn't know how to handle webp, or that trusts the file extension when deciding how to decode the contents of the file, it will fail on these renamed files. This isn't a reliable way to "fix" these sorts of things.