14 DAY TRIAL // Google's WebP image format is starting to get some momentum, or at least that's what Google wants us to think. At Google I/O, the people working on the project showcased some of the progress and some future plans.
It also talked a bit on how it's using WebP internally. Google has started switching to WebP for the sites and apps where it knows this won't be a problem.
At I/O, Google announced that it had switched to WebP images inside the Google+ mobile app a month and a half ago, and that the switch resulted in a 50 percent reduction in bandwidth.
Of course, switching to WebP in an environment you control completely is easy, doing so on the web is trickier.
Since WebP is only supported by Chrome, WebP images on a site would fail to be rendered in other browsers.
What's more, since there are few desktop photo editors and viewers that support WebP, users wanting to save images those images will find that they end up with a useless file.
That's why the Chrome Web Store was a perfect target for the first major rollout of WebP. The web store is likely to be visited only by Chrome users. What's more, most users wouldn't want to save the app screenshots that are most of the images on the site.
Facebook has been experimenting with the format, to the despair of some users, and its interest in turn sparked the interest of Mozilla who is once again considering implementing support for WebP in Firefox.
As for the format itself, Google isn't slowing down. With the most recent updates, the format is basically feature-complete.
But Google wants to add even more advanced features, such as support for layers, more than 8-bit color depth, and progressive rendering.
WebP already supports both lossy and lossless compression, transparency even with lossy compression, as well as animation, making it a viable replacement for Jpegs, PNGs and GIFs, the three image formats that make up the vast, vast majority of images on the web.
WebP images are also generally smaller, sometimes significantly so, than the same images in other formats at similar quality levels.