by Erick Schonfeld
Google is on a mission to make the Web faster. One thing that slows down pageload times are fat image files. Even JPEG and PNG files can get pretty big. So Google is developing a new image format called WebP (which is a sister format to its WebM project for videos). The key to making image files on the Web smaller without losing sharpness is better compression of the original file. Today, Google announced via the Chromium blog. that the compression algorithms for WebP just got better and that they can even handle different parts of an image separately so that parts of it can be displayed without waiting for the entire image to be compressed and decompressed...[continued]
