howtothings.co.uk

Google's new WebP image, will it replace the JPEG?

As part of their world domination tactics, Google have introduced a new image format that cuts down file size by upto 40% in comparison to the JPEG format this will result in pages loading faster and reducing storage requirements. The new file format is called WebP.

According to Google, (who own the Internet :whistle), 65% of the bytes transmitted by web pages are images.

WebP comes at a time when Google has warned the Web developer community that it has started to factor loading speed as part of its criteria in ranking sites in search results. Google have released a number of tools to help developers speed up their websites, WebP is only one of those.

Google took one million random images off the web, with 90% of those being JPEGs, recompressed them into WebP and on average they saw a 40 percent decrease in size. WebP is derived from WebM, Google's VP8 based codec technology for encoding and decoding video that was open-sourced in May 2010.

As well as releasing a conversion tool that allows developers to convert images to the WebP format, Google are adding WebP support in their own Chrome browser in the next few weeks.

One convenient feature of WebP is that any hardware that supports WebM video encoding or decoding also supports WebP. That means a mobile phone with hardware support, for example, could take WebP photos.

If WebP reduces file size by 40 percent compared with JPEG, I'll be all for it.

It will most likely be introduced into Android before anything else. With the information being released now, I'm thinking 3.5 maybe ? I am slightly sceptical about the file type though, just out of interest, will I need some special photo viewer to view WebP? So if I was to save it, could I open it in Windows Photo Gallery, or would I need picasa?

Apparently i'll be incorporated into Chrome within the next few weeks, then Android will probably be next - most likely building it into the hardware, eg. camera to take WebP photos.

Not sure about the ability to view it.

Don't we already have .GIF?

.GIFs are for animations mainly, WebP will replace JPG's as still images.

I use .gif as still image in web design, it still works just as well as jpeg does

DON'T SAVE AS GIF!!!

And do we lose quality with this new scheme? If not, I'll be all for it.

They can compress the image up to 40-50% without losing quality.

Then I'm all for them as standard, and so will most people

Depending on the situation the graphic is required for, depends on the file type which it should be saved.
An example of this is if you was to save an image as a black and white still image, you would choose a monochrome file type because this gives the same output but is drastically reduced in size.

WebP looks intresting and will be sure to read up on this soon, does it support transparency?