WebP is far from state-of-the-art but outperforms JPEG because JPEG is missing the filtering step (where adjacent pixels are being run through a delta-coder) entirely. An alternative is JPEG squishers like Dropbox's Lepton [1] that tries to retrofit this deficiency in a clever meet-in-the-middle way, serving as an additional lossless compression layer while decoding into a perfectly-normal JPEG.
The most exciting parts of WebP, for me, are alpha transparency in lossy images, and animation support. This means transparent photos won't need to be in PNG, and perhaps animated GIFs could be replaced with a more efficient format (while still working in <img> tags and retaining their infinite loop when downloaded).
Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1294490
WebP is far from state-of-the-art but outperforms JPEG because JPEG is missing the filtering step (where adjacent pixels are being run through a delta-coder) entirely. An alternative is JPEG squishers like Dropbox's Lepton [1] that tries to retrofit this deficiency in a clever meet-in-the-middle way, serving as an additional lossless compression layer while decoding into a perfectly-normal JPEG.
[1] https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/07/lepton-image-compress...