Google Forces Saving JPG as WebP?

4 pointsvonseel2 comments

Version 72.0.3626.96 on Mac. Seems a little pushy to force users to use WebP, especially since Preview can't even open WebP format images. Figured the HN community might find this interesting.

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Chrome 72.0.3626.96 on Mojave - I'm still seeing images default to saving in their native format. I tried PNG (Google's homepage image) and JPG (an image on YouTube).

I hope WebP is never forced. It seems like a waste of cycles to re-encode every downloaded image.

The JPEG is most likely converted to WebP in-flight and so Chrome is actually receiving a WebP image. Perhaps it's being served by Cloudflare or another CDN that does image compression.

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