Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Google has created their own image format, which is dubbed WebP. I won’t go into too much detail since that link explains as much as necessary, FAQs and all. In summary, it uses the VP8 Codec, and the goal is to compress images further and more efficiently than ever before. Specifically photo type (lossy) images, which basically means the long-lived JPEG format.
All in all, it uses open source, to provide more open source, to improve the web 😉
Google provides a download for a binary tool, but currently only for Linux users. I jumped on it and tested using a few JPEGs I had on this blog just to have a decent comparison to show. It looks to work exactly how Google advertised. All of the tests were on JPEGs which I compressed to another file also in JPEG format at 60 quality, and WebP format again at 60 quality. No PNGs were used during this test because there are plenty more examples on the WebP site. I just wanted to see how things went using some of my own files, and JPEGs were fine for this.
It looks as though the WebP format wins hands down in size, but unfortunately we have no way to actually view the image. Browsers of course don’t support it yet, and Google hasn’t provided any sort of viewer yet. On average, using the WebP format the converter compressed images up to 35% of their original size. While sticking with the JPEG format, the converter still compressed images up to 20% of their original size.
Of course these numbers are not meant to be anything close to an adequate benchmark. They are only based on a test of 5 JPEG images on a single conversion run. Here are the numbers for the following example image.
Originally compressed JPEG, at 60 quality – 70713 bytes
WebP compressed JPEG, at 60 quality – 43666 bytes
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