Common image formats for the web were developed over a decade ago. And Google thinks it’s about time those formats are updated. So they are in the process of developing a new format, called WebP, that offers better compression at the same quality, thus making images load faster while saving storage space and bandwidth.
The WebP format is actually a derivative of the WebM video codec Google recently released. As part of the development, Google took millions of images and converted them to WebP…”without perceptibly compromising visual quality”. The result? An average decrease in image size of 39%.
Google has posted some of the before and after results here. The good news is that Google will eventually offer the ability for everyone to easily create WebP images through various Google apps. But the bad news is that currently, no browsers support the WebP format.