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Weppy brings WebP support to most Web browsers on Mac OS X
A simple drag and drop and you're up and running with WebP support in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, OmniWeb, Opera, Camino and others. Weppy comes in two versions, one for WebKit-based browsers and one for browsers supporting Netscape plug-ins such as Chrome, Firefox and Camino. Copy the two files into Internet Plug-ins within your Library folder, restart and away you go with 40% better compression. Nick notes that a 350KB JPEG saved with WebP comes out at 65KB, looking identical. A dramatic saving indeed, but considering the two images load in the same amount of time on a modern computer with a decent broadband connection, will anyone care but webmasters?
Head on over to Nick's site to check out the two images in question and judge for yourself.
[Via Download.com]
Comments
12
Subscribe to commentsstopsatgreenOct 7th 2010 6:19AM
"considering the two images load in the same amount of time on a modern computer with a decent broadband connection, will anyone care but webmasters?"
People using dialup. People using PAYG broadband dongles. People using mobile internet. *Lots* of people care about data download sizes.
Samuel GibbsOct 7th 2010 6:19AM
Do people really use dial-up? Man that must be so unbelievably tedious. Perhaps people using cellular data might get a welcome boost, but I don't think that's enough to get the whole web to switch over. Perhaps you could have mobile optimised sites with WebP, but then again, said sites are often super quick to load up and use much smaller images to suit the size of screen anyway.
JohnVillarOct 7th 2010 9:28AM
Samuel, i guess the most interested on lowering data transfers are the mobile operators with their sluggish connections and their limited transfer rates. This could be a boon to the mobile industry in terms of accesibility and time to load pages and content.
I expect the likes of Opera Mini to bring support for this, they are the ones that needs this type of compression most.
Samuel GibbsOct 7th 2010 9:31AM
Opera Mini already compresses everything server side and sends you a flat file. I agree mobile browsers might benefit, but I can't see the standard implemented fast enough to really make a difference. Sure the cellular networks would love this, but it's not them who has to re-encode all the images on a site and implement common support in browsers. Most websites are made with IE6/7 in mind, I can't see Microsoft supporting WebP in an old product like that.
JohnVillarOct 7th 2010 9:46AM
Yep... i know Opera Mini already compresses... but afaik they use JPEG and in some, rare, cases PNG also. The JPEG artifacts when that kind of compression kicks in are awful, i can foresee a better Opera Mini which doesn't destroy the images so bad using webp.
As far as mobile operators go, most of them have their own browsers installed on the handsets, they could use a proxy for image loading and recompress everything down the pipe... you never know ;-)
Samuel GibbsOct 7th 2010 9:50AM
I guess for non-smartphones that's the case, but I've not seen a network installed browser on a smartphone, at least in the UK. I wonder whether WebP has any more processing overhead than JPEG. If it's about the same I see your point, it would be a real killer for proxy compression like that. O2 in the UK does image compression over it's cellular network and it's awful.
JohnVillarOct 7th 2010 10:07AM
Yep, i know some networks compress images on the fly, and that's why JPEG sucks for this matter, because they go all the way through on the lever of bad quality because above "80%" quality, JPEG is too big.
WebP, afaik, was done based on VP8 intra frame format... it should be speedy to decompress but i dunno about compression. Would be interesting to see some speed tests.
Although web-wide standards are difficult to implent, i can tell you it only takes a bunch of key players to implement it (say, IE, FF, Fireworks, Paintshop Pro, Photoshop and the likes) and you're set for a standard to go "boom". I personally use Chrome and for painting Gimp, and i can't wait for the final version of this WebP to begin enabling my web apps.
Samuel GibbsOct 7th 2010 10:10AM
Indeed, never bet against Google. Well fingers crossed, even though I won't benefit personally all that much, I'm all for better compression and smaller sizes if it helps speed up the mobile space. We'll keep an eye on it and let you know if it comes to fruition. Just don't hold your breath. Remember JPEG 2000? lol
JohnVillarOct 7th 2010 10:25AM
Roflol.... yup.... and the oodles of wavelet formats too :-/
JamesOct 7th 2010 10:33AM
I want JPEG XR support.
Howard PearceOct 7th 2010 1:41PM
Doesn't work with Opera (10.70) on Mac
MichaelOct 7th 2010 3:31PM
There is one way that all websites will benefit from smaller download sizes. Faster page load, Google (not sure about other search engines) counts the load time of a site towards it's Rankings, so the faster the site loads (among lots of other factors) the better the search rank. I believe this alone will be a great motivator for web designers/developers to use the new format and help to push browsers for support.