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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

I wish they'd add an option to disable webp, it's really annoying to save a photo and get it in a format that's supported almost nowhere.

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It was just the other day I am thinking, may be all photos saved from the web should either be JPEG ( direct download from the page ) or it would be saved as lossless PNG. We now end up adding AVIF, WebP, possibly JPEGXL, the upcoming WebP2, and what else? I am not entirely sure more format is a good idea.

WebP is a bad idea, which is why they're updating it. We should all ignore it until it goes away.

Amusingly there's also a WebP lossless which is a completely different algorithm they just let a random employee invent.

I thinking more in the line of an image codec that gets constantly updated with browser. And only release it as a standard when it is good enough. So you can iterate and not be bounded by the spec. The server / CDN will serve image that fit that browser requirement, and fall back to jpeg as baseline.

This idea wouldn't work for video due to how computational intensive video encoding are and storage space concern. But may be it would work for image?

Or if we could somehow magically improve the JPEGXL encoder quality by another 20-30%.

WebP is strictly better than jpeg though.

macOS includes a built in image reformatter on right-click that makes it very easy to get a JPEG/PNG out of any image your computer can open

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