>However, JPEG was also patented and that did pretty well. I was under the impression that the free implementations (like libjpeg) did not use and of the paten

>However, JPEG was also patented and that did pretty well. I was under the impression that the free implementations (like libjpeg) did not use and of the patented techniques (such as arithmetic coding which patent recently expired) ? >I think WebP stands a pretty good chance of supplanting JPEG on the web but it will still be used in lots of places. I don't think anything will supplant JPEG as the de facto image format on the 'web', it's simply 'good enough' and of course free and supported everywhere. Also as for lossy compression I'm not sure WebP is a real improvement over JPEG, I'd love to see it used instead of PNG for lossless compression though, as here it is clearly superior.