Windows 10 adds WebP support for Microsoft Edge

Today Microsoft released a new Windows 10 insider Preview build 17692. After updating to this build you will be able to automatically download the WebP Extension for Microsoft Edge. This means Microsoft Edge now supports the Google Image format called WebP. WebP is Google’s alternative smaller image format to that of JPEGs or PNGs.

This is still only present in the Windows 10 preview builds and it looks like it will be available in the next Windows 10 update later this year.

WebP – A new image format for the Web

WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster.

WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index.

Lossless WebP supports transparency (also known as alpha channel) at a cost of just 22% additional bytes. For cases when lossy RGB compression is acceptable, lossy WebP also supports transparency, typically providing 3× smaller file sizes compared to PNG.

WebP Support

WebP is natively supported in Google Chrome and the Opera browser, and by many other tools and software libraries. Developers have also added support to a variety of image editing tools.

WebP includes the lightweight encoding and decoding library libwebp and the command line tools cwebp and dwebp for converting images to and from the WebP format, as well as tools for viewing, muxing and animating WebP images. The full source code is available on the download page.

Source Google.