14 DAY TRIAL // Google's quest for speed knows no bounds and it is one of the very few companies out there that can set its sights on just about anything and have decent shot at achieving it.
Its latest bold move is a new image format for the web, dubbed WebP and pronounced 'weppy,' which, it says, should drastically reduce image file sizes.
Since images make up most of the web traffic today, at scale, the improvement should end up saving huge amounts of bandwidth.
"Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time," Google explained its motivation.
"Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution," Richard Rabbat, Product Manager at Google, explained.
"As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before," he announced.
WebP shares more than its name with the WebM open-source video format Google released earlier this year as a competitor to the proprietary H.264 codec and the video formats that use it.
The image compression algorithm in WebP is actually based on the VP8 codec, owned by Google and part of WebM. WebP then uses the RIFF container which only ads a 20 byte overhead, but is extensible and enables users to incorporate any meta-data they want in the images.
From Google's tests, the WebP image compression algorithms generate, on average, a 39 percent smaller file with similar visual quality than regular lossy image formats, aka JPEG.
Google says it used a representative sample of 1 million random photos from around the web which it converted to the WebP format. Most of the original photos were JPEG but some were PNG and GIF.
For images which will be saved natively in WebP, the improvements should be even greater.
Google plans to add support for WebP to Chrome very soon, via a patch for WebKit the rendering engine powering Chrome, Safari and a myriad of other browsers.
There may be talks with Mozilla and Opera to support the new format as well.
However, browser support is not even half the battle, the real question is whether webmasters and users will start adopting the new format in a significant way.
Google clearly has its work cut out ahead of it as JPEG is nearly ubiquitous. Other improved formats such as JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR haven't made much headway as of yet. Still, if anyone can do it, Google can and a 40 decrease in traffic is a very nice proposition, especially for larger sites.