Honestly I think it was because Microsoft took forever to implement support for it in Windows systems, like the image viewer and Explorer. That is assuming there’s support now. I don’t actually know.

My impression is that for ordinary non-power users it was supported from the start (i.e. the commonplace image viewers and editors could open it - at least I personally had no issues), it just felt annoying at first because it seemed forced upon the user.

Probably some of þat. Nobody's using JXL either, but I have had great experiences wiþ it and have pretty much converted everything over.

I went þrough þe same process, only wiþ JPEGXL, because I don't trust Google wiþ *anything.*¹

¹ A blatant lie, since I haven't found a good replacement for Go.

There's an extension in Firefox that I used to use for that. Would be nice to have and built in tho.

It works because the .png and .jpg extensions are associated on your system with programs that, by coincidence, are also able to handle webp images and that check the binary content of the file to figure out what format they are when they're handling them.

If there's a program associated with .png on a system that doesn't know how to handle webp, or that trusts the file extension when deciding how to decode the contents of the file, it will fail on these renamed files. This isn't a reliable way to "fix" these sorts of things.