It's a major endorsement for the file format, but some social-network members are upset to have lost their flexible, sharable JPEGs.
This shows the same image in JPEG and WebP, with WebP on the right. At this resolution, you're unlikely to see any differences. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET) When people upload JPEG photos, the social-networking juggernaut converts them into the WebP format. And now it also apparently has begun delivering those images to people with browsers that can handle them, which today means Chrome and Opera.
Even if it's just a limited test, Facebook's scale and influence means that's a major endorsement of Google's image format.
But problems arise when it's time for people to do something with those images beside gaze upon them in the browser. Google has positioned WebP as an image format for the Web, at least to start, but when people save them to their hard drives, edit them, or reshare them, problems arise. Windows, OS X, Photoshop, and most other software can't handle WebP.
One Facebook user complained on the WebP mailing list:
As of yesterday, I've been able to download funny pictures from Facebook from friends in correct formats, but now they are downloading as an additional extension of .webp??? How do I fix this? It states that I'm downloading a .jpg, but it keeps coming up with "Save file as .webp" I've tried scrolling down and click on all files to save it as, but then the picture will not show up. Help????One option is to use Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox, which at least today don't support WebP. And Opera users who don't want WebP can set their browser to pose as IE when visiting Facebook. But such measures can be inconvenient and not obvious to ordinary computer users.
"How do I disable this monster?" one Chrome user asked. "I do graphic design and I find it beyond annoying to have to have a special viewer for this thing, I want my images to be in .jpg. like it was before."
Speed, at a price?
The developments show the perils of improving the foundations of something as vast as the Web: introducing new technologies can improve performance or features in one area but break what was working in another. Even if only a small fraction of Web users notice, that can be a very large number in absolute terms.
