Eric_WVGG

I don't even care about that. JPEG can't do alpha channels. WebP can. That makes JPEG a perpetual headache.

Cool. Regardless, my point stands: this is a mainstream image format today (as others have pointed out, Google, Facebook and Twitter drive somewhere close to half the web and use it), and that ratio will only grow. Photoshop doesn't support it? Is the point of Affinity Photo to be as good as Photoshop, or better? I don't understand the arguments against supporting WebP at all. Is it the work involved? It's not a lot of work, open source libs for WebP are commonplace. Are they secretly hoping that WebP will fail in favor of superior, patent-free formats? I've been waiting twenty years for that, good luck.

What the heck is Serif PhotoPlus, and why would I want to install a separate editor for basic functionality? Hell I could just convert images using ImageMagick from the terminal, the problem here isn't that we can't convert images somehow.

We're not talking about what Monterey offers today (it's great, btw), but what is going to happen over the next eight years. Running Catalina in 2030, at which point it would be eleven years old, would be roughly equivalent to running Snow Leopard today. Like, I dunno, maybe you'll bail on MacOS in favor of Windows or Ubuntu or iOS, maybe MacOS won't exist at all by then. But I'd wager that whatever you do, you'll have a WebP-compatible browser someday.

Basically I can write a picture tag as per: <picture> <source srcset="img/image.webp" type="image/webp"> <source srcset="img/image.jp2" type="image/jp2"> <img src="img/image.png" alt="woof"> </picture> But also it's also just a matter of time until you upgrade. I would wager you're not going to be on Catalina in 2030, and I've been in this business long enough to care about the long game..

Astonishing that adding WebP support is in any way controversial. The simple fact is: the web needs a lossy compression standard with support for alpha. PNG is not lossy. JPEG doesn't do alpha. I've been a web developer for over twenty-five years now. I am about as pro-open-standards and anti-FAANG as they come. Of course I would prefer to be using JPEG-2000 or something whose patents have expired (if in fact they even have). I thought this would be a solved problem by 2008. Then I thought it would be solved by 2012. Then… look, it's just not going to happen. Apple gave up and embraced WebP. I don't like the fact that it won, but it did. If Serif disagrees, I guess that's one more reason to seek alternatives.