> Mandatory Google bash comment: - It's mainly another wheel reinvention from Google, because reasons.
WebP seems to have been the first "let's just use intra-frame coding" image format out there though, and it's hardly the first format to have tried to unseat JPEG.
WebP is 4 years older than BPG (Bellard's HEVC-based format), 5 years older than HEIF (MPEG's same) and AVIF was only specified 9 years later.
It's a sad story of broken promises. Back when video == Flash, Google bought and opened VP8 codec and got a bunch of companies to promise support for VP8 video.
Back then it made a lot of sense to also have an image format based on exactly VP8 (despite it being a poor fit for still image format), since everyone promised to support it, including hardware acceleration.
But Adobe never added VP8 to Flash, hardware support was too little too late. VP8 died, and WebP is burdened with compatibility with a world that never materialized.
Mandatory Google bash comment: - It's mainly another wheel reinvention from Google, because reasons.