Cutting bandwidth usage on mobile clients by 28% seems like a pretty good win to me. If the gains were 5%, I agree it would be iffy, but ~30% is nothing to shake a stick at.
This whole issue seems sort of like SPDY. HTTP-NG went on for a more than a decade and produced nothing. Google rolled out SPDY, and suddenly we have an HTTP 2.0 spec being discussed. Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good, and vendors rolling out implementations forces the community to act and put resources on an issue.
Even if WebP doesn't end up as the ultimate new replacement for JPEG/PNG, the fact that Google, Facebook, and others are rolling it out will likely force some movement to get serious about finding a replacement. Ideally, one doesn't roll out an implementation until there is a consensus spec agreement, but the real world usually doesn't match up the the ideal.
Look at how asm.js's rollout forced V8 to adapt. Even if V8 isn't adopting asm.js, Mozilla shipping it forced the V8 team to spend more time optimizing those paths.
I don't particularly care if WebP is the final image standard or not. What I don't want to see is Mozilla sitting on their hands waiting for a solution to fall into their lap, and putting all their resourcesin Daala.
I expect standards working groups to actually have working members, actively engaged in putting forth positive proposals, not people who just sit around and raise objections. That was one of the problems ARB had for years. If that doesn't happen, then you end up getting steamed rolled by proprietary proposals (e.g. Cg, CUDA, et al)
This whole issue seems sort of like SPDY. HTTP-NG went on for a more than a decade and produced nothing. Google rolled out SPDY, and suddenly we have an HTTP 2.0 spec being discussed. Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good, and vendors rolling out implementations forces the community to act and put resources on an issue.
Even if WebP doesn't end up as the ultimate new replacement for JPEG/PNG, the fact that Google, Facebook, and others are rolling it out will likely force some movement to get serious about finding a replacement. Ideally, one doesn't roll out an implementation until there is a consensus spec agreement, but the real world usually doesn't match up the the ideal.
Look at how asm.js's rollout forced V8 to adapt. Even if V8 isn't adopting asm.js, Mozilla shipping it forced the V8 team to spend more time optimizing those paths.
I don't particularly care if WebP is the final image standard or not. What I don't want to see is Mozilla sitting on their hands waiting for a solution to fall into their lap, and putting all their resourcesin Daala.
I expect standards working groups to actually have working members, actively engaged in putting forth positive proposals, not people who just sit around and raise objections. That was one of the problems ARB had for years. If that doesn't happen, then you end up getting steamed rolled by proprietary proposals (e.g. Cg, CUDA, et al)