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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.

by mort967 hours ago|

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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.

by xp845 hours ago|

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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.

by Dylan168074 hours ago|

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

by mort963 hours ago|

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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.

by Dylan168074 hours ago|

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

by mort963 hours ago|

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

by Dylan168071 hours ago|

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I'm also mad at anyone that linked to only libpng.

If you have support for multiple file types, you're already using multiple libraries or you're using a library that handles several kinds of file, either way you can and should update that.

by asadotzler7 hours ago|

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We had plug-ins to support them all.

by mort967 hours ago|

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And that was a pretty bad solution. Nobody wants to see "this web page doesn't display correctly because you're missing the bla bla plug-in".

by kstrauser3 hours ago|

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For the hundredth time, I miss Amiga’s “datatypes” system. You’d download a sound or image or video or compression library and drop it in the right place to register it with the OS. Then any app which used the OS’s built-in system for opening media files automatically got support for that format, without changing a line of code.

Imagine if installing libzstd meant that every program on your computer suddenly knew how to use ZSTD compression, or adding libjpegxl added support to every browser, word processor, and age editor you’d already installed.

Some parts of AmigaOS were wonky, like lack of memory protection. Others would still be phenomenally useful today.