Leave it to Google to figure out a way to make your internet experience a bit more fast-paced. The key to doing so appears to be cutting down the file size of those pesky and sometimes bulky JPEG files.
To the not-so-technically inclined, a JPEG (and a GIF) is any graphic file. Web pages have a ton of them. See something that isn’t straight text? It’s probably an image file, and a lot of image files can take a toll on your web page load times. Google is now offering a new tool to help give website developers a way to help their sites load faster by cutting out the needless information in a JPEG file. Say hello to Guetzli, an open-source JPEG encoder.
Here’s how Google describes the function of the tool on its blog;
Guetzli [guɛtsli] — cookie in Swiss German — is a JPEG encoder for digital images and web graphics that can enable faster online experiences by producing smaller JPEG files while still maintaining compatibility with existing browsers, image processing applications and the JPEG standard. From the practical viewpoint this is very similar to our Zopfli algorithm, which produces smaller PNG and gzip files without needing to introduce a new format, and different than the techniques used in RNN-based image compression, RAISR, and WebP, which all need client and ecosystem changes for compression gains at internet scale.
So, it basically trims the fat, and that makes the image quicker to load, which makes your web page quicker to load. That’s all good. Faster is better.
This is especially true for a growing mobile internet approach, where users are accessing the internet more and more using a mobile device. Making it easier to load information on your phone is key for a successful website, and making those images as easy to load as possible will be a design element taken into account. Using this new tool from Google should pick up quickly if it proves to be successful.
Now, what does Google plan to do to cut down on websites using auto-play videos? That’s a resource I would get behind in a hurry!
[Google]
