In its continuing attempts to make the Web faster, Google is trimming down the size of image files, which make up about 65% of the bytes on the Web.
Google announced late this afternoon that it’s releasing a developer preview of a new image format, which it’s dubbed WebP. An alternative to the JPEG format, which is typically used today for Web pictures and images, WebP should “significantly” reduce the byte size of images, Google promises.
And that reduction is expected to enable Web sites to load a whole lot faster. “Images and photos… can significantly slow down a user’s Web experience, especially on bandwidth- constrained networks such as a mobile network,” Richard Rabbat, a Google product manager, wrote in a blog pos