What's needed is a downloadable JavaScript renderer which parses the webp file format and draws the resulting image in an HTML5 Canvas. Then we don't have to w

What's needed is a downloadable JavaScript renderer which parses the webp file format and draws the resulting image in an HTML5 Canvas. Then we don't have to wait for browser makers to implement it in their browsers. You just add a one-line script tag to load webp.js, a script that scans your DOM for img tags with a src that ends with ".webp", and your website has webp support. If browsers later support webp natively, you can just add a check to webp.js so it turns itself off when a webp-supporting browser is detected. It's really too bad that Java in the browser never took off; its performance characteristics are far better for writing image decompressors than JS. But JS with a modern HTML5 Canvas running in a modern JS engine on a modern CPU is good enough for the purpose.