Google slips open source JPEG killer into Gmail, Picasa

Yeah, right

"It seems it's posters like you who give the internet a bad name".

Have you asked the authors of the "image editor too complicated to use" why they haven't added webp yet?

webp uses existing open source libraries very heavily to provide a truly compelling format: bitmap images are both significantly smaller and of better quality than comparable JPEGs or even JPEG2000 especially if they contain text.

Re: Apache Support

An educated guess as to why an Apache module would be necessary/a vaguely good idea: It's probably so that image files in "legacy" formats (i.e. those that people actually use in real life) can be automatically transcoded to WebP upon request from the client.

Accept: http-request header

When the web-browser requests the contents for an <img> tag, it sends a http-request including one like

Accept: image/png, image/jpeg, image/bmp, image/svg;q=0.5

The web-server can (as others have mentioned) use this to provide the image in the 'best' format that the browser can render, bandwidth considerations included. The optional q= tag is an indication of how good the MIME-type is to the browser, 0 being unacceptable and 1 being ideal.

A conferment web browser should ignore the extension on the <img> tag, and instead use the MIME-type sent in the browsers format to decide the format of the image (and all other media for that matter).

Reasons

Webp is visibly superior to JPEG while creating much smaller files. As it uses the same algorithms as in webm you can also hope for better optimisation including the hardware acceleration which is just around the corner. Webp is also a container format so it does also do lossless compression, very efficiently, if desired, so you can use the same format for your graphics as for your photographs, effectively streamline your workflow.

Adoption of PNG was slow partly because it was initially hamstrung - no animation and no transparency - and so offered little incentive to content producers who didn't need to worry about a Unisys tax. Also, PNG was introduced shortly before the Microsoft won the browser wars and killed innovation. It survived as a good replacement for BMP and TIFF and later became the web 2.0 designer's darling because of the alpha channel. Now we're seeing at least two new browser versions per maker per year with fairly rapid take up for all apart from IE on the back of security issues.

webp is a good candidate for adoption which is why it's already in Opera's Turbo stack and my *guess* is that it will make it into a Google's pagespeed http-server module, allowing transparent, feature-driven (WURFL) rollout. And while bandwidth may be cheap and plentiful for many of us page load speed still matters, especially on those pesky mobile devices so the operators will want to plug it in as well. And which webmaster in their right mind won't take a 40% reduction in page load time for free?

Re: What's the use?

It may not make much difference to the end user but a 40% reduction in image size is a hell of a difference in bandwidth for the web servers of a high-traffic site or for ISPs who shift massive volumes of data every day.

I agree that it'll take time for it to become popular but it won't become popular at all if they don't start now.

Compare them.

No, really. Save a file in WebM at the highest quality, then try saving the same file as a JPG, matching the file size. The JPEG will be much, much worse. Set JPEG to the same quality, and it'll come out a whopping 66% bigger (yes, that's how percentages work to those who see 66% and are confused by the fact that it's not 40% =)

Essentially, WebM isn't just "different", it really is unequivocally "better".

Grab yourself a copy of of the WebM Photoshop format filter, and a copy of filtermeister - open any random "real" image (let's saw a raw photograph of good old' nature, or a crisp illustrator-exported vector graphic), save it to highest quality JPEG, close the file, reopen the original, save it to highest quality WebM, close the file, and then open all three.

Create two new images, copy the origina image's layer to both, and then copy the jpg layer to one, and the webm layer to the other. Invert the colors on both layers, and set their opacity to 50%. We now have a difference result. Flatten Both images, job's a good'n.

So that's the first thing we really care about: can you see any artifacting? I've had to run this test many times, My puny human eyes can't. Not without first zooming in a lot, anyway. But let's assume that this isn't enough to convince you, because what should be {127,127,127} could be {126,128,129}, right? Maybe you care about that difference. You shouldn't, but maybe you do, so let's see how strong the difference really is.

Fire up fiter meister and write a small color ramper - For all three channels (R,B,G, neither WebM nor JPEG officially support A), set up a color ramper so that if the color is off from the 127 mark, it gets stronly boosted, say fifteen fold, with a cap at 0 and 255. Now you can see the difference in how JPEG and WebM do their magic - WebM actually uses much nicer spells, with less intense differences between the original and the lossy encoded image.

This really is a fantastic image format, and long overdue. The only tarnish on its reputation is that the world hates "new" formats. Thankfully, the company that wants to push it also happens to make one of the more popular browsers. And you can be sure that the code for enabling WebM in Chrome finds its way into webkit, followed by the Mac supporting WebM. Photoshop already supports it with the download of a single file, and suddenly its future looks nice and bright - Superior image format alternative for JPG that makes super tiny files? About bloody time.

Mine's the one with the WebM filter on a USB stick attached to my key ring.

$$$ cost

You quite assuredly would want the best compression you could get, if you were paying the bandwidth bill for a website that transmitted billions of images per day

Like Google.

More interesting is the green angle. Are compressed images unconditionally better because they eat less electricity in all the network routers? Or are they worse because they need extra CPU cycles to create them in the first instance? How many retransmissions equals one compression in CO2 emissions? (Sorry, no answers).

Luxury

Maybe it's because not everyone is as fortunate as you to have high speed connections and fat hard drive. Maybe it has something to do with the way that websites are no longer being constructed carefully with a view on loading times but have reached a 'chuck it in, everyone is on ADSL2 at least'.