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by dist-epoch8 hours ago |
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upvoteby 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.
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upvoteby xp846 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.

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upvoteby Dylan168075 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.
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upvoteby mort964 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.

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upvoteby Dylan168075 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.
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upvoteby mort964 hours ago|
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However many decades you wait, libpng is not gonna add support for WebP
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upvoteby 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.

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