14 DAY TRIAL // One of Google's most interesting and most obscure technologies is WebP, a new image format designed for the web, aimed at replacing JPGs, PNGs and, in its most recent version, GIFs as well.
The image format, though still in the early stages, has some interesting characteristics: it supports both lossless and lossy compression, transparency, animations, and results in smaller images for quality comparable to that of other formats.
But that's all moot since the only major browser to support WebP is Google Chrome. Opera supports it as well, but its 1 to 2 percent market share on the desktop doesn't bill it as a major browser.
That may change though. As Cnet spotted, Mozilla is now considering at least adding support for WebP to Firefox.
No decision has been made, but the fact that it's considering it should be good news for Google and for websites interested in the new format.
In fact, that's the big reason why Mozilla is thinking about it. It has received indication from large websites other than Google that they would be interested in deploying the format.
There's no word on who the large website or websites may be, but Facebook pops instantly into mind. It is the largest photo website in the world, as large as all the other photo websites put together, and this without including Instagram.
The hundreds of billions of photos Facebook stores take up a lot of space and a lot of bandwidth. Switching to WebP could result in massive savings and speed improvements at Facebook's scale.
Apart from interest from websites, there's been plenty of evolution on WebP's part since Mozilla last looked at it. In fact, some of the big minuses have since been fixed.
Mozilla initially complained about the lack of support for EXIF metadata, lack of support for ICC color profiles and lack of support for alpha channels. All of those are included in more recent versions of the WebP spec.