WebP: A new image format for the Web

Here's a post from the Chromium blog [1], which has more details. It also states how Google is already using it in Gmail, Picasa and instant search previews.<p>Google is in a great position as they can write a spec, release a browser implementing the spec and update their sites (which account for a substantial portion of the web) in such a short time. In essence, there is no "chicken and the egg" problem of who goes first.<p>This also happened with SPDY [2], which Chrome already supports and most Google sites now use instead of HTTPS (for Chrome, at least).<p>I think we can expect Google to do everything they can to make the web faster.<p>[1] <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/05/webp-in-chrome-picasa-gmail-with-slew.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.chromium.org/2011/05/webp-in-chrome-picasa-gmail...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.chromium.org/spdy" rel="nofollow">http://www.chromium.org/spdy</a>

I made a QuickLook plugin for it: <a href="https://github.com/dchest/webp-quicklook" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dchest/webp-quicklook</a>

I can understand Google's reason for making and promoting WebM, but is there really a need for another image format? Yes, it may be X% smaller than JPEG for the same image quality, but does that really matter? Compared with video, the bandwidth for serving images is practically nothing, and even with universal adoption by browser and operating system vendors it will still be years before you can rely on all your clients having WebP support.

Until they sort out the video tag and the audio tag they should keep away from messing up the img tag in the same way.

So does this mean that Chrome will drop support for JPEG, PNG and GIF? I mean, that was the case with the video tag.

How is WebP better than JPEG XR (HD Photo) which already has an ISO standard?