WebP Could Help Chrome Grow Even Faster

Chrome is already regarded as one of the fastest growing web browsers on the market, both in market share and browsing speed. As far as the plans for the latter, things go beyond improvements in the JavaScript engine, V8, and tackle content compression, namely images.

Up until recently, Google’s WebP format featured lossy image compression. But the development team managed to achieve lossless compression and support for transparency. Placing this detail into the browser speed equation, Chrome should become even faster, as the same image quality can be delivered with less impact on the bandwidth (check out the side by side comparison).

This also aligns with browsing enhancements in the smartphone segment, as users would be able to navigate more and faster at the same bandwidth cost.

However, encoding/decoding process has not been optimized for processing speed at the moment, and it may take quite a while to witness a shift in web developers’ choice of images.