Internet resources: Google unveils it new image format for the Web

As part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, Google Corp. has released a number of tools to help site owners speed up their websites. Its new image format for the Web is called WebP. The new Google’s tool will help to significantly reduce the size of photos on the web down 40% as compared to popular formats like JPEG, GIF and PNG preserving the quality and resolution.

Google has already released a developer preview of a new format. On the website you can download a special tool for conversion of JPEG files to WebP.

WebP promises to significantly reduce the bite size of photos on the web allowing web sites to load faster than before. Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web, and they can significantly slow down a user’s web experience, especially on bandwidth-constrained networks.  

To test the new tool Google’s developers randomly picked about 1 million images from the web (the images were converted into WebP from JPEG, GIF and PNG). Google stress that conversion of files from uncompressed formats, like TIFF, will enable to reduce the byte files’ size even more considerably compared to JPEG.