alt Hacker NewsHaving a PNG go from 164.5K to 127.1K as lossless WEBP is not what I'd call "marginal". An improvement of over 20% is huge for lossless compression.
Going from lossless WEBP to lossless JXL is marginal though, and is not worth the big decode performance loss.
Replies
lonjil • yesterday at 5:23 PM
Since the person you replied to mentioned MozJPEG, I have to assume they meant that WebP's lossy capabilities were a marginal improvement.
In context of the parent comment, 'only 20% improvement' is not super exciting, 'compared to the pain of dealing with yet another new image format'.
You raise a good point, though; WebP certainly did (and continues to do) well in some areas, but at the cost of lacking in others. Moreover, when considering a format for adoption, one should compare it with other candidates for adoption, too. And years before WebP gained widespread support in browsers, it had competition from other interesting formats like FLIF, which addressed some of its flaws, and I have to wonder how it compares to the even older JPEG 2000.