[awalton]

> it's terribly slow and requires a lot of memory.

...and generates a solution that uses far less bandwidth, especially after thousands or millions of hits, which is the real point of the exercise.

Cloud computing companies love this. They've got a lot of bored hardware to put to use. It's absolutely no surprise to see solutions like this coming from Google. Spending a dollar of compute time to save $1000 in bandwidth is a no-brainer win for a company with a million servers.

[vladdanilov]

At the image upload rate nowadays, there's a place for a practical solution, and for any external company, that kind of cloud computing will cost a fortune.

[simooooo]

Have you noticed a lot of image results from a Google search are actually .webp, probably also for that reason