It's fair to say that Google is on a mission, a mission of speed. For a while now Google have been announcing audacious projects which aim to speed up everyones web viewing experience. Over the last year they have announced plans to introduce 1Gbps fibre to the home and a more efficient and faster web protocol, SPDY. Speeding up the web doesn't stop there however as both these technologies focus on the transmission of data and not the actual data being transmitted. With images accounting for around 65% of the data transmitted between web page views according to Google, it makes sense to improve upon the efficency of image compression while retaining a good degree of quality.

This is probably why Google's Product Manager, Richard Rabbat has announced via the Google blog that enginners at the company have been working on a new image format called WebP (pronounced Weppy) which aims to reduce file sizes while still retaining image quality. While testing the new format, Google looked at around 1 million jpg images and convert them to the new WebP format and noted on average a 39% reduction in file size. Images converted straight to WebP can expect even lower file sizes while retaining the same degree of image quality as JPG provides for most web images.

Although the new format doesn't support an Alpha channel (transparancy), Google say that a future update to the format will provide this feature, something that JPG can't do. Currently web designers have to use PNG or GIF for transparancy. The format is also flexible enough to allow a variety of meta data to be embedded into the image, something Googles search engine will no doubt make use of.

Every one who uses the web could benifit from this new format particluarly those who use bandwidth strangled mobile networks. If Google can get the likes of Firefox and Microsoft on board there's no reason why WebP should't be a big success in the future. The mobie ISPs might also thank Google for reducing their costs since less data has to be transmitted to mobile devices. It will probbly be some years before this new format takes off but Google is already planning a patch for it's WebKit based browser Chrome that will see the browser have native support for the new format.

Link: Google WebP Gallery