Google makes push to standardize new web picture format

As the top online search engine in the world, Google, hopes to make the web more efficient, the company has announced a new ambitious strategy that could see most of the web switching over to a new image format.

The new open-source format, called “WebP” (pronounced “weepy”), would be an alternative to the JPEG format that is already internationally accepted because of the good quality it offers with relatively small file size.

The JPEG format is one of the most efficient formats due to the optimal balance of quality versus size, and Google even encourages using that specific format as the company largely only indexes JPEG pictures in its popular Google News service.

Google says in its testing of a sample of 1-million online picture files (largely JPEG, PNG, and GIF formats – the exact composition was not disclosed), the company was able to reduce file size on average by just under 40-percent with very marginal degradation in picture quality.

The company says about 65-percent of Internet content is pictures.

If the majority of web developers switch to the new WebP picture file format, aggregately, there could be many significant positive implications, such as significant cost savings as picture downloading and uploading would drastically decrease the amount of network load given the smaller file sizes. Additionally, web developers and enterprises (think Facebook) could reduce storage costs as many photos on a hard drive, including on cloud-based storage systems, aggregately sum up to material size amounts.

The web experience of Internet users in emerging markets would also increase as pages would load faster, and networks would also reduce server strain and therefore costs.

Google says as part of its plan to help standardize the format, its next update to its Chrome Internet browser in the coming weeks would natively begin supporting the format.

Google acknowledges it could take a very long time for WebP to become widely adopted and standardized, but the company says it is in it for the long haul despite the challenge.

Google WebP Sample

Google JPEG Sample