Google has resumed work on JPEG XL support in Chromium after removing it three years ago. A developer says the current version is feature complete and under review.
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
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.
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.
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
Would be nice if browsers could reconvert to PNG for download
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.
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 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.