Google JPEG alternative aims to speed up the Web

From InfoWorld: In its continuing attempts to make the Web faster, Google is trimming down the size of image files, which make up about 65 percent of the bytes on the Web.

Google announced late this afternoon that it's releasing a developer preview of a new image format, which it's dubbed WebP . An alternative to the JPEG format, which is typically used today for Web pictures and images, WebP should "significantly" reduce the byte size of images, Google promises.

And that reduction is expected to enable websites to load a whole lot faster. "Images and photos... can significantly slow down a user's Web experience, especially on bandwidth- constrained networks such as a mobile network," Richard Rabbat, a Google product manager, wrote in a blog post.

"In order to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts, we randomly picked about 1,000,000 images from the Web (mostly JPEGs and some PNGs and GIFs) and re-encoded them to WebP without perceptibly compromising visual quality. This resulted in an average 39 percent reduction in file size," he wrote. "We expect that developers will achieve in practice even better file size reduction with WebP when starting from an uncompressed image."

Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, noted that this level of file size shrink could greatly speed up transferring of images. The issue will be making WebP a standard in a JPEG world.

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