Google has launched a new image format, called WebP, which the company claims will result in smaller file sizes for commonly shared small image files, in amove that could threaten the dominance of the popular JPEG image format used across the Web.
According to Google, photos and other images make up about 65 percent of all content accessed via the Web, and therefore all Web traffic.
Those same files re-encoded with WebP will produce files that are, on average, 39 percent smaller than other formats, reducing the load on servers, ISPs including mobile carriers, and the Web browser clients themselves.
Today, image files are typically encoded via JPEG, a standard that was originally published in 1992. JPEG is a ‘lossy’ standard, which means that some of the image fidelity is lost when an image is encoded or re-encoded. Other file formats, such as .PNG, use lossless compression, which maintains the original image data.
Read the fuill blog post here: http://blog.chromium.org/2010/09/webp-new-image-format-for-web.html