WebP Creator Responds to Yet Another Hater
Description
A screenshot of a Twitter conversation highlighting user frustration with the WebP image format. The first tweet, from user Lily Alexandre, hyperbolically states, "every time chrome saves something as a .webp instead of a .jpg i want to create a hostage situation." Below this is a direct reply from Jyrki Alakuijala, the creator of WebP, who calmly points out, "WebP is 10+ years format, almost 12. It should work in various software by now." His profile picture notably features him holding an Emmy award. The humor stems from the creator of a widely used technology personally and dispassionately refuting a common user complaint. For senior developers, this is a relatable scenario of a technology's maturity outpacing the ecosystem's willingness or ability to adapt, and the dry, factual comeback from the source is the punchline
Comments
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The five stages of dealing with a new standard: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, getting a dry, factual correction from the format's creator on Twitter
Twelve years old and WebP still needs a permission slip from the procurement committee - meanwhile our COBOL batch job just asked if it can save as BMP
"It should work in various software by now" - the same energy as telling your PM that technically the API returns a 200 status code while the entire frontend team is filing bug reports about malformed JSON responses
When the WebP format creator tells you 'it should work by now' after 12 years, but half your toolchain still treats it like a foreign diplomat without proper credentials. It's the technical equivalent of 'works on my machine' at the ecosystem level - sure, Chrome's been pushing WebP since 2010, but apparently nobody sent the memo to every image editor, legacy CMS, and corporate workflow tool still living in the JPEG era. The real hostage situation is being caught between Google's aggressive format evangelism and the enterprise software procurement cycle that moves at geological timescales
Chrome negotiates image/webp; my asset pipeline negotiates with Marketing, so the endpoint now pipes dwebp | convert and returns Content-Disposition: filename=legacy.jpg
WebP is supported - until your CMS’s MIME whitelist and half the design stack say “unknown format,” so CI quietly runs convert *.webp to *.jpg and everyone pretends standards won
WebP at 12 years old: finally mature enough to be the new legacy format no one asked to debug