Earlier this week I was at a meetup and got to hear Tobias Baldauf speak about Image Compression. He talked about tools like jpegoptim and jpegrescan and also the new compression formats webp and mozjpeg. If you haven’t seen the talk I suggest that you do take a look at it.

If you don’t have time to watch it right now, then here are some cliff notes.

Right now WebP is beating MozJPEG in compression (32.9% vs 12.1%) however, compression with MozJPEG yeild less dissimilarity between the original image and the compressed image than compression with webp (0.3% vs 0.09%).

So why should you use MozJPEG instead of WebP? Well, WebP is only supported by the Chrome browser while MozJPEG is backward compatible with the decoders currently implemented in browsers today. Also, According to Tobias the compression methods used in Adept will be implemented in MozJPEG which could mean the compression size could become equal as good as in WebP.