Comment by kasabali
3 years ago
That's a very good point. At this rate of development I wouldn't be surprised if libjxl becomes x264 of image encoders.
On the other hand, libvpx has always been a mediocre encoder which I think might be the reason for disappointing performance (I mean in general, not just speed) of vp8/vp9 formats, which inevitably also affected performance of lossy WebP. Dark Shikari even did a comparison of still image performances of x264 vs vp8 [0].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150419071902/http://x264dev.mu...
While WebP lossy still has image quality issues it has improved a lot over the years. One should not consider a comparison done with 2010-2015 implementations indicative of quality performance today.
I'm sure it's better now than 13 years ago, but the conclusion I got from looking at very recent published benchmark results is that lossy webp is still only slightly better than mozjpeg at low bitrates and still has worse max. PQ ceiling compared to JPEG, which in my opinion makes it not worth using over plain old JPEG even in web settings.
That matches my observations. I believe that WebP lossy does not add value when Jpegli is an option and is having hard time to compete even with MozJPEG.