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File Format: A Replacement for JPEG?
Roughly two-thirds of all bandwidth on the Internet today are photos and images, and JPEG lossy-compressed images make up the bulk of that. Google now has a open-source candidate replacement for JPEG, and they are calling it WebP (pronounced weppy).
Richard Rabbit, product manager at Google, said that “most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.”
The compression rates of the new format are good, up to 60 percent better than JPEG, and averaging around 40 percent better. Compression is even better when starting with a raw bitmap file rather than starting with a JPEG file. That could mean faster loading time for web pages and faster times for mobile connections. One drawback though is that the encoding time for WebP is considerably slower than JPEG, eight times slower, in fact. Another potential problem is that WebP is derived from WebM, a technology for compressing video that Google acquired when it purchased On2 in August 2009, has been the subject of patent lawsuits. And a final factor going against it is the fact that it is from Google — it is likely that there would be push back from companies like Microsoft and Apple, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Microsoft or other companies start offering up their own alternatives.
Google now wants to replace the JPEG file format with WebP. This will help to load the webpage faster comparing to JPEG file format.