Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This is a futile effort by Google and will go no where. If they somehow managed to chop file sizes

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This is a futile effort by Google and will go no where. If they somehow managed to chop file sizes by 90% or more, it would have a small chance (it still wouldn't be guaranteed, as in the era of CDNs and caching and large pipes, static images just aren't a big concern). Instead they've marginally chopped file sizes in only certain scenarios, while adding numerous new downsides, while actually reducing the feature set. Are they insane? I'm surprised they actually announced this. Like MP3, JPEG is good enough unless the improvement of a replacement format is overwhelming. It doesn't have the political baggage of something like h264, so that argument doesn't apply. More interesting than this silliness from Google are formats that actually bring new and impressive features. I recall that JPEG2000 could do incremental, stallable loading (or maybe I'm thinking of something else), such that as you scaled an image it wasn't loading an entirely new image, but instead was loading incrementally more data to provide the detail for that level. IP stopped it from taking off, but that was actually interesting. This isn't.