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Is there a real distinction? It can be a great format, but if actually using it sucks then in practice it's a pain to use/encounter. (I don't actually have this problem personally - all my apps seem to handle it fine - but the argument seems reasonable.)
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Yes, it's important to distinguish annoyances of the codec from annoyances of the ecosystem.

Ecosystem being slow to adopt it is something that can be fixed or improved, but also more importantly (given jpegxl & avif comparisons) are things that will impact any new image format.

Meanwhile annoyances of the codec tend to be things that are dramatically harder to deal with. Like HEIC being a license minefield and also slow as shit. Or that many of these newer image codecs do not have ways to work with them in a memory efficient manner like jpeg does (see eg libjpeg-turbo's sample size & skip scanline options). Or WebP insisted on being in a RIFF container for... uh... absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever afaict. Fortunately RIFF is so trivial that this overhead doesn't actually matter in practice, but then HEIC & AVIF dials up the annoying container bullshit to 11 thanks to their video heritage with ISOBMFF

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It seems much harder to get an audience as someone complaining about technical details of codecs and their implementations, than as someone complaining about the formats (which in practical terms is always going to mean the ecosystem, or really, how broad the support base is or what the user has to do in order to deal with it).
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> Like HEIC being a license minefield and also slow as shit.

How much slower? I'm finding very conflicting numbers.

But on the timescale of "wow this still doesn't support webp" those patents will solve themselves soon.

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Perhaps it's a matter of who hits the pain point? Ugly specs make annoyed devs, licensing problems make distributors unhappy, and ecosystem issues leave users unimpressed. (With some spillover between categories, of course.)
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I haven't seen much if anything saying webp itself is annoying directly, and your conclusion agrees with what I've seen. The complaining I've seen is about the tooling available (mainly from non-techies who don't care to know how to convert to another image format because, and I agree, why should they?) that once you've got a webp image file from one site the next site you try to upload it to doesn't accept them. For those of us who can convert the tooling has been there for ages, as have editors happy to load and save the format.

Though TBH I still use JPEG, PNG, or GIF, depending on use case, out of habit. The size saving for the same quality of lossy compression is not something I've found myself hankering for. It is different if you run a site that sends out millions of every image, but nothing I do is that popular and is never likely to be, and no one stuck on a really slow connection where the difference would matter to them is going to be accessing my stuff.

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> the conclusion is that the problem was never about webp itself but the tooling and ecosystem to handle it

That is true in life.

EVs aren’t annoying, the charging infrastructure is.

Etc

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Does Windows already display WebP files in File Explorer? :-|
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> the tooling and ecosystem to handle it

That’s the whole point, though. If the tools I use don’t handle it properly, it’s annoying. Saying it’s an ecosystem problem doesn’t change that.

How long has it been now? And from what I’ve seen, even Google’s own stuff doesn’t always handle it. That’s not helping their case.

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Yeah it's purely the fault of the tens of thousands of application devs that have been too stupid to recognize the obvious and immense benefits of webp over existing widely adopted formats /s
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Firefox actually silently and automatically converts images to webp in some cases when you Save As them, with no option to revert to the format you see in the DOM. It’s fucking infuriating. I hate webp because the support is so spotty.
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I highly doubt that is what's happening. More likely the server is serving a webp under a .png filename or something.
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I have observed the behavior you suspect many times.
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I don't think that's firefox doing it? I'd guess it's some CDNs doing the conversion. Or the URL says .jpg but when you look at the mimetype sent by the server it's actually webp. Extentions are meaningless for browsers.
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It's not Firefox, it's the server. Edit and resend the request with header "Accept: image/jpeg" only and you'll most likely get a JPEG file.
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That seems more likely. I still hate webp.
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Does it actually request the image that it already downloaded again to save it to a file? Seems rather silly?
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No, the server is just sending the file named 'foo.jpg', but encoded as a webp with webp mime type, so when you save the file it defaults to the webp extension cause it ends up treating the filename as a blob of text without an expected extension for the file type.
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