Google’s WebP image format, fastens the web browsing

Well, it’s still an on-going project by Google, based on their open-sourced VP8 video codec. The big G claims that this image format can really make your experience on the interwebs, a lot faster than now – with almost no image quality loss.

Indeed, image formats that are used to output in today’s every browsers are based on a decade old technologies. Richard Rabbat says that they had pick up thousands of images of PNG, JPEG and GIF format, and tested out, converted those to WebP format. Resulted, 39% of the size of each images were reduced. Smaller the size of the image, faster the webpage loads up. The final conversion tool (images to WebP) will be soon released publicly.

The question remains: How many browsers will support WebP format? And what about old browsers. The idea of WebP is quite good, but the output has to be compatible with almost every browser. We believe the developers will come out with some sort of scripts, as temporary solution. You can check out the quality difference on this webpage, although the compared output shown is not actual WebP – those images are converted from JPEG to WebP to PNG (uncompressed.) Don’t compare the size, only quality is defined on this webpage.

(source: Google Chromium Blog)