In order to increase the speed of browsing Google has invented new image format and called it WebP. This is one more step taken for even faster browsing.

The format sounds like "weppy", WebP is related to a lossy image format that was compressed in order to reduce the size of the image file to minimum the same way as JPEG format. Actually, there is a hope that WebP will come to JPEG place.

WebP was tested on a million pictures and in all cases it was able to decrease the size of the picture by 39% in average. There was no compromise with quality as the size of image files is cut. That was announced in the Google blog post by Richard Rabbat, the product manager of the company. He also added that the company expects even better results and bigger reduction with assistance of WebP format from an uncompressed file. The main goal is to make the websites load faster as images make about 65% of page weight in bytes.

VP8 compression is in the basis of WebP’s compression. VP8 format was released by Google in May as an open source. It is applied also by WebM video format. The techniques of intra-frame coding of VP8 video format were applied to the still image coding. In addition, Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) was taken as the basis for container of light weight, which was adapted to achieve the goal set. Each image will weigh 20 bytes per picture maximum. It will be extensible to be able to store the meta data. One more advantage of the invention is the possibility to regulate the process as you can control the file size and adjust it in accordance with the quality obtained.