There is a huge demand for everything to be faster, especially internet speeds. We are constantly trying to see how much data we can pack into our devices and how quickly we can do it. Instead of always focusing on giving each user more bandwidth, it also helps to reduce the size of the files that we are trying to send and receive. The combination of these two methods can greatly improve overall internet “speed”.
The development team at Google has focused on the latter of these two and they have created a new image format which is called WebP. WebP is an image format specifically designed for the web and it’s based off of the VP8 video codec. Google claims it’s WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to the PNG format. Google also says that WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller in size when compared to JPEG images.
WebP is not widely supported, mostly because it’s brand new, but Google is trying to change that and they hope to completely replace the current web image standards. You can find our more information on this new image format on Googles’ own developer page.