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Google Introduces New Image Format - WebP

By Aloysius Low - on 1 Oct 2010, 3:07pm

Google Introduces New Image Format - WebP

Google continues its mission to make the web even faster with the introduction of a new web image format - WebP. Based on its VP8 open source codec, the new format promises up to 39% smaller files, which can translate to a much faster web page loading. Google says most of the traffic on the Internet (65%) are mostly photos and images, and helping to reduce file sizes by ~40% will translate to quicker page loading. When we went over to the comparison gallery, we couldn't see any difference.

Note - browsers aren't capable of displaying the current format, so Google has converted the file to PNG for viewing. It can be a little confusing at first, but what you're seeing is the WebP image, but encoded in PNG (hence the bigger file size). Google does provide the original image for download and comparison.

blog.chromium.org - As part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, over the past few months we have released a number of tools to help site owners speed up their websites. We launched the Page Speed Firefox extension to evaluate the performance of web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them, we introduced the Speed Tracer Chrome extension to help identify and fix performance problems in web applications, and we released a set of closure tools to help build rich web applications with fully optimized JavaScript code. While these tools have been incredibly successful in helping developers optimize their sites, as we’ve evaluated our progress, we continue to notice a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images.

Full blog post here and image gallery here.

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