Thursday, May 16, 2013

Webp - The new image standard from Google

Google has been promoting a new image format for the web called Webp. Google+ and Facebook are adopting WebP format.  The advantage of Webp is that it will make images much smaller in size compared to the existing jpeg, gif and png formats. Google has been promoting it at this year's I/O conference.

At present it seems to work well with chrome. There is support for IE, Opera and Android. To download the codecs visit Google Dev



I tried converting a jpg image to the webp format and the result was impressive. See images below

Webp file, size= 106kb

start of webp file


End of webp file

If you cant see the image between the start and end tag then either open this blog in chrome or download the webp codecs from Google dev

Jpg file, size = 418kb



As a content Publisher, I am encouraged to see such formats being developed as it will make the web much faster and also reduce my bandwidth cost and cost of hosting.

Edit on 20th May
Strangely Blogger seemed to have converted my webp image into a JPG file. If you try to save the image it saves as a jpg. Looks like Google hasn't rolled out its standard on their own sites. Facebook however seems to be gung ho about the technology. 
CNET articles 

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By Ramakrishnan Laxman

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