Google's WebP Picture format will it make a difference?

Google had been working on a very ambitious project to introduce a new picture format called WebP. It is said that it compress the picture file size by 39.8% minimum and that too with minimum or very less picture quality loss.


The main idea behind this format is to make web search even more faster as mostly over 60% of the data on the web is in pictures. Webmasters, web developers and browser developers can use the WebP format to create smaller, better looking images that can help make the web faster i.e load the website faster with less amount of file size.

Google plans to replace the very popular JPEG file format which today is one of the most popular amongst webmaster ans web developers with this new file format.

How does WebP work?

WebP uses predictive coding to encode an image, which is the same used by the VP8 video codec to compress keyframes in videos. Predictive coding uses the values in neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the values in a block, and then encodes only the difference (residual) between the actual values and the prediction.

The residuals typically contain many zero values, which can be compressed much more effectively. The residuals are then transformed, quantized and entropy-coded as usual. WebP also uses variable block sizes.

To much technical stuff huhh..

Currently WebP is supported only in Google Chrome 9 and the project is still under progress. WebP is an open source project and three of its 5 member team consists of Indian engineers.

Will WebP be successful?

Very difficult to tell. For it to be successful it has to be supported by all the browser and Operating systems. Not only that Webmaster should be ready to adapt this new format and designing the images need to be really very simple for some one to even think of using it.

But as far as browser supports you never know just like flash plug-ins can be individually downloaded on the browser same thing would happen in this case. This way people who encounter these images would be prompted to install the required plug-in.

Lets see where does Google take the world further in the world of WorldWideWeb.