[freitzkriesler2]

It's an annoying format that Google made that's proprietary and reinvents the wheel.

Had Microsoft done this the tech world would be up in arms. When Google does it, it's OK.

I have to add extensions to convert this crap when I want to download images. I hope that Google loses their dominance to Microsoft with AI.

[madars]

webp is not proprietary. There is a patent grant https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/g/webp-discuss/c... and reference implementation is BSD-licensed.

[nayuki]

You might be interested that Microsoft developed JPEG XR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XR , https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/jpeg-xr/ .

And in the past, they tried to shove Windows Media Video and Audio down our throats, which are inferior relatives of MPEG-4, AAC, FLAC, etc.

[halJordan]

But you don't have to add extensions to convert this crap. You do that to yourself. If you quit making your life hard it would be so much easier, but probably less complaining- so i guess that's the trade off.

[tedunangst]

You do have to handle it though, and rarely when you want to. You click on a jpg link in your browser and save it, but the CDN invisibly converted it to webp. Which the program you want to edit the image in doesn't support. I didn't ask for webp. I didn't try to make this difficult.

[NavinF]

All modern image editors support webp

[taway1237]

Certainly not all, as the ones I'm using don't. Unless you have a very cherry-picked definition of "modern".