Dear : Please stop saving images as webp when I drag them out of the browser. Forever stop that. Even if they are webp originally, just give me a setting to auto-convert them to JPEG. When I

Mister Moo 🐮@mastodon.online to Firefox@lemmy.ml – 102 points –

Dear @firefox : Please stop saving images as webp when I drag them out of the browser. Forever stop that. Even if they are webp originally, just give me a setting to auto-convert them to JPEG. When I get a webp file the first thing I have to do is convert it manually if I'm going to do *anything* with it.

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Implicitly converting anything anywhere is always a bad idea, especially when it can't be done in a lossless way.

There could be an option to auto convert to PNG. I wouldn't want anything auto converted to a lossy format like JPEG.

lost mastodon user

Did they intend to tag an official Firefox account or something? I'm not sure how this works on the Mastadon side of things.

Mastodon's UI for groups is terrible. This community is indistinguishable from an account named "@Firefox" with thousands of followers unless you open its page and notice it says "Group" and understand what that means.

When I save an image, I want the exact same binary 1:1, not a recompressed one or whatever, I want the original picture, be it jpeg/png/webp, every graphics program can open webp, nothing wrong with it.

At least if you hate webp, convert them to png, but not jpeg...

webp is a great format though...

Too bad so many platforms are not compatible with it. I am constantly having to convert the image type to post the image.

thats on the platforms not the format

I am constantly having to convert the image type to post the image.

Try changing the file extension. Often the extension is checked but not if the file format matches the extension. All browsers read WebP just fine.

Never had a problem on Linux

Websites that do not recognize webp normally are fine when you run Linux?

Not really. It is better than shitty JPEG encoders but not really much better than good ones. It's lossless was fairly good but still barely worth it. Really we should chuck it for JPEG XL but Google is strong-arming it for unknown reasons.

jpegxl should be the successor, granted - but that doesn't make webp any less good

No, but it also doesn't make it any good to start with.

Google is strong-arming it for unknown reasons.

lol. Yeah it’s a mystery.

Exactly, great quality and small file sizes. Perfect to reduce web bloat, or loading times when using things like FoundryVTT

WebP images are not bad. Not great, but not bad. The lossless mode is quite good. It is on the software you use to support WebP.

So nothing before 2020, got it. Smh

So nothing before 2020, got it. Smh

Windows supports WebP. Software that uses Windows APIs to read image files has no problem reading those even if it's from before 2020. I forgot which application it was but in one case changing the file extension was enough for me.

webp is 13 years old. I’ve only heard of Apple not supporting it.

I see others mention some chat apps, weird but ok.

It's not really Firefox's task or problem to convert files from one format to the other, why would it be?

Why is it that the url ends in .JPG but when I right click and save image I can only save it as a .webp?

Some CDNs like Akamai and Cloudflare have options to optimize images. We use the Akamai one where I work. It means our creative teams, customers, etc. don’t need to worry too much about whether an image is properly optimized when they upload it. Akamai will, behind the scenes optimize the quality, color palette, and image type (jpg, web, png, etc) and create a number of different versions of the images. Then when a client requests the image Akamai looks at the client device (mobile vs desktop, screen resolution, browser version, etc) and serves the copy of the image that’s best optimized for that device.

So even if the URL ends with .jpg you might be sent a .webp. If you use the browsers developer tool to inspect the response headers you’ll likely see the Content-Type header says it’s .webp as well.

Because the URL is lying, and the image is not a jpg.

There is an addon to request jpeg. But converting lossy...why?

Shouldn't we strive for webp compatibility in more applications so it can be viewed readily and easily?

Sure. And then use formats that are good enough that have broad support.

Attack the problem from both sides.

I mean Gwenview, GIMP and tons of other apps support it. I dont know an app that doesnt support it actually

I had issues with Libreoffice and Inkscape yesterday. Had to open it in paint.net first, and save it as jpeg.

Hm, not sure if Inkscape is meant for that?

Edit: never mind, it has a purpose and should actually support webp

You should be able to import raster images in Inkscape for tracing or reference purposes

I don't care if it was meant for it, it is the best tool I've found so far for what I want to do: put text over an image to create a custom gift certificate.

It works perfectly for what I want to do with it, except it doesn't understand .webp. It seemed like it is implemented, but didn't work. It does take .jpg.

It would be great if GIMP, Inkscape, Firefox, Krita, Okular, Loupe, etc. could just use the same libraries on the system.

Viewing app specific stuff belongs to the apps, but why the hell does every program need its own webp renderer?

What are you using that can't handle webp by now?

Facebook Messenger on android. I hate messenger but that's where my Luddite family hangs out. Often have to convert the webp meme I downloaded from lemmy first.

Just screenshot instead of download and convert.

We live in a society with rules. What you're suggesting is anarchy!

Sometimes anarchy makes more sense.

only a kludge, not a fix: Don’t Accept image/webp

jxl can't come fast enough.

Why? PNG is good enough today, so everything moving to jxl isn't particularly urgent for me. AVIF is probably a better option in terms of platform support vs jxl.

But yeah, when it's ubiquitous, it'll be cool I guess.

PNG is good only because it's widely supported. It only has 8bit per channel, no support for arbitrary channels, has subpar reading and writing performance. For lossless purposes I suggest TIFF, for packing data OpenEXR is best and JPEG-XL is very promising but has limited support right now

Here is an article (centered on a film use case) https://www.provideocoalition.com/fight-of-the-file-formats-pngs-or-exrs/

Compatibility is really important, which is what this post is all about. In a discussion about automatic conversion, PNG should be on the table.

What are you guys even doing with your images?

I use png or jpg depending on what I want and that's about it.

Yea me too... given the state of support for modern formats

This post is why we can’t have nice things

Webpee is more Google shit being forced down our throats. They absolutely will eventually phase out all other graphic formats on Chrome. These giant tech companies are breaking the Web and this is just another example of them throwing their weight around.

I like it, it's much smaller than PNG and JPG for the same quality. I save all my images as webp.

fortunately, since you use Firefox, there are a handful of extensions available just for this problem already. Maybe not for the drag n drop, though...

@kuneho I love Firefox and dragging images out of the window is a great thing to be able to do, but not when they're webp.

funny thing is, for some reason, it just... never came to me to just drag images from the browser and save them like that 😅, but surely sounds a logical and convenient thing to do, so I can see your frustration

I think it's a Macintosh workflow that's spilled out. From what I've seen, folks either use it heavily or not at all

I prefer PNG because of losless-nes (is that right?). If it's jpeg, or webp originally, i don't mind getting the image in that format. But converting/recompression is bad.

It should be spelt "losslessness". "lossless" is an adjective and when you add "-ness" to an adjective it becomes a noun.

I prefer PNG because it losslessly compresses raster images.

I prefer PNG because it uses a lossless algorithm.

I prefer PNG because I love losslessness.

After turning the word into a noun though, you'll need to know how to turn it back into an adjective. We use "-less" to turn the noun into an adjective.

I prefer PNG because it losslessnesslessly compresses raster images.

I prefer PNG because it uses a losslessnessless algorithm.

I prefer PNG because I love losslessnesslessness.

If you hate webp because you can't easily view it, let me recommend ImageGlass as a replacement image viewer for Windows (maybe Linux too, I forget).

because you can't easily view it

What? Every image viewer on my system opens webp.

Trouble opening images to view them is the only reason I can think of for such widespread hatred of an image format. I don't know OP's level of tech savviness so it seemed like a safe guess.

the problem I have is how several file browsers don't support generating thumbnails for them, and how a few social media platforms don't support animated webp.

That's fair, tho the last part is true of animated PNG too. Hell, a lot of them will be all like "upload a short, optionally audioless MP4 and we'll call it a gif"… :P

@MisterMoo @firefox Echoing this!!! Stop it with webp entirely!!! NONE of the applications I use accept webp as input where images need to be uploaded! Not even Discord!

I want youtube downloads to stop being in webm. I set my gui app that downloads to prefer mp4 even if it's lower quality. I will do the same with my command line tools when I get around to it or get frustrated enough that they aren't supported by QuickLook on my Mac.

@MisterMoo @firefox I use the extension "Don't accept image/webp" don't know if that would help for your use case. but it does do it for the right click/saveas

@MisterMoo @firefox

I was looking for a fix that didn't involve yet another extension, but only found how to block webp entirely which would just result in broken image links. Sadly i also found that this is a security vulnerability, likely deliberate for data harvesting, and has been a problem for FOUR YEARS. It's only the incidence that is picking up now.

I just change the file extension to PNG and call it a day. Somehow it fixes all my compatibility issues.

Skill issue.

I'm a Linux user and didn't even notice, let alone care, when I downloaded images as webp because it works just fine with all my other software (Dolphin, Gwenview, GIMP, etc.). There is no problem with webp; who gives a shit?

@grue You don't need to identify yourself as a Linux user. The insulting remark at the top of your post and the tone of the rest of it makes it clear.

Ever been forced by your workplace to use a piece of software you'd prefer not to? For example, ever tried to share a webp image on MS Teams? You can't; you have to convert it first. Lots of household-name software rejects the format.

Hopefully the Firefox team needs to care about more than the needs of condescending Linux users.

I also find this insulting even as a linux user myself.

OP you can try GIMP in the meantime as Firefox exports WEBP. There is also a portable version by PortableApps.

Have a nice day, OP.

For example, ever tried to share a webp image on MS Teams? You can’t; you have to convert it first.

That's funny because the underlying Chromium engine reads WebP files just fine. Write a bug report to Microsoft. The error message is clearly a bug.

It's not Firefox's problem that MS Teams (or other "household name" software) sucks.

Edit: ITT: people getting mad at me for pointing out that they're misattributing the blame.

Agreed. I dislike webp intensely but it’s not firefox’s problem to solve. Be mad at google, not firefox.

@grue Another very productive reply. Great. Enjoy your perfectly cross-compatible software environment that somehow exists despite a lack of compatibility not being a "problem" for any software maker to care about.

You mean I should enjoy my perfectly cross-compatible software environment that exists because the the people making it recognize their responsibility to support the latest standard, rather than acting like proprietary software makers by whining and demanding that everybody else cater to their old, broken shit?

Thanks, I will!

But by all means, continue wallowing in your self-inflicted misery instead if you want. Just don't get mad at me for not "productively" explaining how to solve your problem, because I have. You just don't want to hear it.

@grue Stop replying now.

Why are you @ing people? Lemmy uses threaded comment trees, we can see who you are responding to!

Why are you @ing people? Lemmy uses threaded comment trees, we can see who you are responding to!

OP is a Mastodon user who confused an unofficial 3rd party Lemmy community with Mozilla's bug tracker.

You using shitty software is not something somebody else would or should feel inclined to solve. Suggesting that everybody should suffer from not receiving the content they request from the webserver, but instead an arbitrary lossy compressed and therefore different picture for your individual comfort is just a self-centred, ignorant and narcissistic request. So go away and use edge, and then complain to Microsoft (whom you pay in contrast to mozilla+community!), that their shitware doesn't work.

I would imagine that the company that they work for is the reason they use Teams

@skilltheamps Weird, I could *swear* my post asked for "a setting" but I guess in your absurd black-or-white world that translates to "everybody should suffer."

Nono, you are demanding in a not nice tone from a open source community to implement some bloat workaround to fix some you-specific-issue with commercial software. You know how free and open source software works? Either you contribute something positive, or you color yourself glad you get to use something so great completely for free and stay silent. Bark at that commercial vendor that doesn't use the money from licenses + selling your soul to build something half decent! This upcoming demand-culture around things that others kindly share with wanting nothing in return pisses me off. Especially when it's not even something about the project, but carrying over unrelated cruft, instead of directing the demand to the entitiy it would be justified against.

Just build a browser extension that does the conversion. Or a script that watches a folder where you drag it into as an intermediary, and then it converts it automatically. And then share it for free, because you are a kind person! You might find a handful of people that like it. And then watch some asshat writing you a demand that "stop converting to jpeg, forever stop that! I need bitmaps for my gameboy! Just give me a SETTING where I can chooose and a nice dialog where I can pick the freaking color palette!"