The JPEG format was finalised in 1992 by a committee that met for six years to agree on how much visual information a human eye would tolerate losing — the answer, roughly 90 per cent, is why every photo on the web looks the way it does

A single uncompressed 24-bit colour image at 640 by 480 pixels ran to about 900 kilobytes. T.81 describes a baseline sequential mode, a progressive mode, a hierarchical mode, and a lossless mode that almost no one implemented. Google’s own comparison found WebP files averaging 25 to 34 per cent smaller than JPEG at equivalent visual quality, and AVIF and JPEG XL push the compression gains further still on top of that. JPEG XL was on track to become the successor for photographs; then Chrome pulled support in 2022, citing insufficient interest from the ecosystem. Whether JPEG XL or anything else eventually replaces baseline JPEG on the open web is still an open question.