Understanding that vendor-by-vendor, your Windows 11 PC may, or may not be able to handle these images because for a $1 bundling licence fee, some people cheaped out.

And hand-installing the algo code is a tiresome one time process with if-but-maybe (no, it is not as simple as clicking on and paying for the licence frobs on the MS Store)

The comment flows online about this are classic. "Apple did this to us all" against "Why should I buy s/w licences I don't need" (as if you don't have a tonne of licences in your soft and firmware as-is to a variety of people) against "This format isn't any better anyway" against "Isn't this just about the video streams" against "Is this what those motion video sequences are from Apple" (no, thats different, even if encoded in HEIC...

Guys, enough already. Just pay a one-time somewhere in Redmond, and put this logic back into an update so we can move on with our lives.

For HN, where readers are expected to be hackers, reading that you might want to go online to convert a HEIC to something is a little bit weird. Paragraphs like this:

  The Shift to Client-Side Processing (Local Conversion)
  To solve this privacy dilemma,
  modern web development has shifted towards Client-Side Processing.
  This means the conversion software runs entirely
  inside your web browser using your device's own hardware,
  without ever transmitting the file over the internet.

makes me cringe. Local conversion is not when you open a conversion website in your browser monstrosity that runs JavaScript locally. Local conversion is when you use ImageMagick to convert a file from any format to any format locally, without launching a browser, completely unnecessary for this purpose.