WebP news

We can safely say that this fall the WebP format is experiencing a rebirth. Messages about new features follow literally one after the other. Here I will provide a translation of the most interesting news regarding the format of WebP and the prospects for its development and support. The topic is not deliberately issued as a translation, since the data are given from several sources at once. So, translucency, lossless compression, support for IE6 + and so on!

• WebP has added animation support . You can set arbitrary time intervals between frames, as well as make looped animations.
• WebP now supports ICC color profiles and XMP metadata .
• Tiling support has been added : saving large images as a group of smaller images, so-called tiles, in one file. This allows, firstly, to load only the necessary parts of the image, and secondly, to exceed the webp limit on the frame size.
• The same message says that [good | evil] plans to support thumbnails and stereoscopic images.
• On November 17, support for translucency (alpha channel) and lossless compression was announced . It is argued that WebP in lossless compression mode yields a gain of 45% of the volume compared to the average PNG and 28% compared to a well-optimized PNG. In turn, the alpha channel data adds only 22% to the file size.
• And, perhaps most important. Dominik Homberger ported libwebp library to javascript (translucency is already supported!). So now WebP in one form or another is available in all modern browsers (including IE6 +, donkey support is done via fallback to flash). The license is the same as that of WebP (BSD). Unfortunately, I could not find the source code repository. But for those hack readers who would be interested to see how it looks in the code, I unpacked and formatted the sources, and put it on pastebin (links - at the end of the post).
  Enjoy learning!
• However, for Firefox, using a different javascript library, weppy , which “wraps” webp images into a WebM video container, which is initially supported in Firefox, can be a more efficient solution.
• Let me remind you that "out of the box" at the moment WebP is shown only by Chrome and Opera. But among the developers of Firefox, the idea of ​​supporting WebP caused a serious discussion, which is still ongoing .
• For those who want to experiment with the new format themselves, I’ll recall links to plugins for Photoshop , GIMP and Paint.NET .

UPD: In fact, Dominik Homberger has made as many as three libraries to support WebP in browsers. One, libwebpjs, is a javascript encoder and decoder. The second and third (work in a pair, the common name webpjs ) - decoders in javascript and flash (for IE) + wrapper that implements webp support in tags img, css and so on.

Actually, the source:
libwebpjs
webpjs (javascript part)
webpjs (actionscript - part)