We all want the internet to be faster, right? Well, Google is hoping to make that happen one YouTube thumbnail at a time. Its leaner WebP image format has been used on the Play store for some time now, and Mountain View’s latest venue for the faster-loading files its video service. The outfit says that the switch has resulted in up to 10 percent speedier page-loads, and overall it’s shaved tens of terabytes off its internal data transfer rates every day.
The WebP team at Google focuses on making the web better through smaller, faster-loading images. We’ve seen that WebP compares favorably with other contemporary image formats, but our team has been hard at work to make WebP even faster and more capable. A few months ago, we added support for animated WebP images to Chrome, making WebP the first unified format that can address the key use cases of JPEG, PNG and GIF files. The recent release of libwebp 0.4.0, currently in Chrome’s Beta channel, is a culmination of numerous encoder and decoder optimizations that make encoding lossless images twice as fast, and decrease lossless decode time by 25%.
