Google, the company that created and heavily promotes WebP as a superior open-source format for the web, won’t let you insert a .webp file into its own flagship presentation software, Google Slides. This creatres a very interesting case of corporate schizophrenia.
Franco Folini
It’s baffling that, in 2025, Google Slides still doesn’t natively support the WebP image format. This stands in stark contrast to the fact that WebP is natively supported in Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, and Opera, as well as by many other tools and software libraries.
According to Google’s own pages, Lossy WebP compression uses predictive coding to encode an image, the same method used by the VP8 video codec to compress keyframes. Predictive coding uses the values in neighboring pixel blocks to predict the values in a block, then encodes only the difference.
It’s hard not to feel like this is a classic example of a company prioritizing profits over users, as Cory Doctorow calls it, “Enshittification“, the title of Cory’s latest book.
When the core software ecosystem lacks basic integration, like supporting your own format in your own app, it erodes user trust. It makes us, the users, feel like we’re just beta testers for a collection of disconnected products, not users of a cohesive, well-supported, well-designed suite.
Let that sink in. Google, the company that created and heavily promotes WebP as a superior open-source format for the web, won’t let you insert a .webp file into its own flagship presentation software, Google Slides.
I just tried. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature that has been missing for years, despite countless user requests.
This isn’t just a minor inconvenience; it’s a glaring symptom of a much larger, more frustrating problem. Why does this happen? Is Google’s right hand unaware of what its left hand is building?
