This should actually finally be fixed as iOS 14 rolls out, of course there's still IE ...

https://css-tricks.com/webp-image-support-coming-to-ios-14/ https://caniuse.com/?search=webp

Internet Explorer is officially unsupported by Microsoft. Nobody should write anything new with support for IE.

Microsoft claims otherwise: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/internet-expl...

_Internet Explorer is a component of the Windows operating system and follows the Lifecycle Policy for the product on which it is installed._

Some of their sites are like Office365 will drop support, but only on 2021-08-17.

So after several years of ignoring a better file format apple will start supporting it when it's already being deprecated by an even better format?

WebP was a bad idea so it's good to not support it. It was released years too early, since they started the incompatible VP9/10 right after.

Erm. What kind of logic is that? Are you from a parallel universe where time machines exist?

They should not have released it without a much longer open comment period, if they expected anyone else to implement it. VP8 had barely just come out of hiding from a private company and hadn't been reviewed.

I have known the author of WebP (he previously worked on XviD) and I'm pretty sure it was his pet project.

By the way, doesn't Windows still open WebP in a browser rather than in a picture viewer?

The Windows "Photos" app doesn't support webp, at least not without an extension, so it doesn't associate the file extension with the app. Chrome can display these photos, so it registers the webp file extension.

That's it - webp isn't treated as a first-class picture file format even on Windows. You can hardly expect Apple being more progressive this way.

https://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm#UpdatedPlugins :)

Or https://sourceforge.net/projects/jpegview/ - slightly less (yet sufficiently) powerful but looks better.