Bellard's BPG (Better Portable Graphics) format boasts a compelling quality advantage over JPG, particularly when images are heavily compressed. Take a look through the gallery to see a few comparison shots – the left hand side of each image shows the JPEG compressed format, the right side shows BPG at a similar file size.

The BPG files seem to hold up vastly better, demonstrating a lot less color banding, blocking and step-ladder aliasing along edges, and producing pleasing images down to surprisingly small sizes.

BPG files can also handle transparency, which JPEG files can't – although GIF and PNG files can, and those are both supported by most Web browsers. Currently, BPG files require a 55 kilobyte Javascript decoder to be embedded in a website before they can be displayed.

Is BPG likely to take over as a successor to JPEG? There's a few factors running up against it. In the most simple sense, JPG is more or less doing a good enough job. Designers are comfortable with using it online, it's well understood, it's supported pretty much everywhere, and internet connections are becoming fast enough that image download times aren't the issue they used to be.