I've read it. Yep, looks like they can be compared for the static images. But what about animation? And there are plenty of websites using webp already. It is not like JPEG or WebP - why not just support them both!? (or APNG and WebP).
Reminds me of MNG, where we had an animation format with support for alpha and either PNG or JPEG style compression of frames, but it never got a pervasive browser implementation so it died. (I get the impression there were strong technical reasons for that, of course.)
Coincidentally, MNG also indirectly solved this problem. JNG was a subset-format of MNG that provided JPEG-compressed static images with optional support for alpha, so implementing MNG implied implementing JNG. But we never got it on the web.
At the very least, instead of just saying 'WebP is bad', they're putting their money where their mouth is and advancing the state-of-the-art in JPEG encoding so that people won't need WebP (other than the alpha channel use case, that is.)
Are there many websites using WebP that aren't Google properties?
I'll be interested to see if a VP9- or Daala-based version of WebP is more compelling.
Try gif2webp and gif2apng converters on this example, and you will know:
https://www.google.com/logos/doodles/2014/world-cup-2014-54-...