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Google WebP to Take on JPG Image Format

by Terrence O'Brien on October 2, 2010 at 09:00 AM

google webp
It's not enough that Google has its own video codec in VP8, or its own protocol for transferring websites in SPDY, or its own programming language in Go (not to mention two operating systems, a browser, and countless sites and services). Now, the world's largest Internet company is taking on the field of image formats with WebP. This hopeful successor to the JPG crown is actually 40-percent smaller than the Web's most popular image format yet provides the same quality of image. The goal, of course, is to speed up how fast your websites load, since photos and images make up almost 65-percent of the data transferred. The young format does have some downsides. Namely, it takes eight times longer to encode a WebP file than it does a JPG. Like Google's other experiments (specifically VP8 and SPDY), WebP may not see huge adoption. Still, many of the lessons that Google learned while creating the technology may find their way into more broadly supported standards like JPG. You can download the conversion tool from Google here.

Tags: compression, google, image, images, photos, top, web, webp, Webpage

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