Disable WebP format in Chrome

Question

This is one of the most irritating behaviours I've ever experienced.

You retrieve a JPG file from the Web, but Chrome forces you to download it in WEBP format. Absurd conversion especially when it is not desired (and there are many, many reasons for this: wanting the exact original file, retrieving metadata, problems reusing the webp file in other software, etc).

Is there a way to disable this annoying behaviour?

example: https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Stardog.jpg

Solution 1

You retrieve a JPG file from the Web, but Chrome forces you to download it in WEBP format.

Don't blame Chrome for this behavior. This behavior is implemented by the "Polish" image optimizer in CloudFlare, not by the browser.

There is no way to disable WebP support in Chrome; even if there were, it would not prevent web servers from delivering WebP images if they believe your browser would prefer them.

Solution 2

Try putting a ? after the image location, then save.

Make http://example.com/image.png like this http://example.com/image.png? and CMD+S save (Mac) will save as the expected format.

Comments

[galacticninja]

FYI, if I use Brave (a Chromium-based browser) to download that file, I get a JPG file and not a WEBP file.

[user1156544]

You are right, I can see the header cf-polished: qual=85, origFmt=jpeg, origSize=44781 content-disposition: inline; filename="....webp". Quite annoying that the original final cannot be downloaded.

[user1686]

Well, Chrome announces WebP support in its HTTP "Accept:" header, so maybe you could have an extension that modifies this header to remove image/webp?

[Admin]

@grawity My experience has been that Cloudflare is pretty insistent about trying to deliver WebP. Last time I tried, modifying or omitting the Accept header had no effect.

[user1686]

Oh so it means CF is doing the User-Agent nonsense then. Sigh

[user1156544]

Great workaround

[Edge]

Why does this work?

[Peter Kionga-Kamau]

You might have to add some random text after the ? - the ? alone may not work. This random text will generally bypass CloudFlare/whoever's CDN/caching which has optimized as webp and instead download the original by sending a pull request to the origin server

[phuclv]

Windows already has native curl since version 1803, i.e. 3 years ago. And PowerShell already has all curl's capabilities

[Ian Dunn]

Thanks, I updated the answer.

[Marc]

Still works @ date time stamp.