Google has launched an improved version of the WebP image format, which is designed to reduce the image size on the web and speed up browsing. WebP is now natively supported in Chrome and Opera. Google products including gmail and Picasa Web Albums, have also added support to WebP so you can share, send and receive WebP images. WebP support is also coming to AppEngine. In addition, Google Instant previews now store images in WebP to reduce its storage needs. Google says it is working on transparency (alpha channel) support and will ass it to the "... next stable version of the codec."
The WebP format was introduced by the company last year in 2010. "WebP's compression algorithms have been significantly improved while remaining completely compatible with the previous releases," Richard Rabbat product manager and Pascal Massimino, a progrmmer as Google started in a blog post. "On the decoding side, we have integrated a fancy upsampler. Fancy upsampling reduces the pixelation of strong edges. You can see this feature when you zoom in," the post added.
The improved version will also include technology that will allow the image-data to be internally decoded during its download. With this feature, users won't have to wait for the entire file to download before being able to watch it.
