Yes but webp hasn't taken off as much as some would like as a defacto standard.
BPG looks good upon cursory inspection. It seems to be more efficient than WebP and supports 42-bit color. It also has .png's features of transparency and lossless compression although I didn't see anything mentioned about animation to replace .gif.
Bonus: since it's based on h.265 hardware support will come naturally and should be just a software update for devices that already have HEVC capability.
Doesn't a JavaScript implementation offset most of the performance benefits? Today we have browsers that are smart about when to cache the decoded image and when not, etc; does that have to be reimplemented in javascript?
From the article:
"Mozilla did a study of various lossy compressed image formats. HEVC (hence BPG) was a clear winner by a wide margin. BPG files are actually a little smaller than raw HEVC files because the BPG header is smaller than the corresponding HEVC header." This study includes WebP.
WebP is in some ways superior, in particular because it has a lossless option like PNG. [Edit: NOPE, I was mistaken.] I think it's kind of a shame that it hasn't caught on all that well. Maybe it's a fantasy, but I'd sure like to consolidate all web images into a single widely-supported and open source format. Ah, to dream...
