The web isn’t quite fast enough, says Google, and they’ve decided that they can do better than JPG, PNG and GIF, with the introduction of a new image format, WebP.

It seems as if Google have found a new way of compressing images, whilst keeping them sharper and less prone to compression artifacts than the current file systems in use.

For now, WebP is only supported in Chrome and Opera, but we’ll see whether Firefox and (god forbid) Microsoft throw themselves into the mix as well.

Exciting times to be a photographer!

More about the format on the Google Code site – and the announcement was made in the Chromium blog
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