Google is looking to make the web faster these days by working on cumbersome images besides pointing out deceptive websites.
Google Chrome Labs has developed a new web tool that’s’ called Squoosh that allows developers to compress and reformat photos.
Main features
The application taps WebAssembly to squash down images using some codecs, and it’s available on all browsers.
You can access Squoosh online via the official website and once it’s loaded it will also be able to work offline within your browser as well. This web-based application is easy to use, and it supports a range of web formats such as PNG, WebP, JPG, and MozJPEG.
It also shows you a one on one visual comparison of the initial image and the compressed version so that the differences are highlighted better. After you finished editing the photos, just tap download in order to save the images locally.
Squoosh is an open source tool, and this means that whoever is interested in its code, they can check it out on GitHub.
Some features only work on Safari and Firefox
Googler Jake Archibald told Engadget that the new app has some features that only work on Firefox and Safari.
“We expose all the encoders the browser has internally, and Firefox supports encoding to BMP,” the developer advocate at Google said.
He continued and explained that “Safari defers encoding to the OS so it can encode JPEG2000, TIFF, BMP, PDF, GIF. Chrome doesn’t have these features.”
Google has been obsessed with page loading times, but on the other hand, the team ignored just how bloated Chrome is, says Engadget.
Closing words
Google is also hoping these days that they will be able to expand the fast loading mobile web pages into a web standard which is beyond the current adopters such as Bing, Twitter and more.
Engadget says that the eradication of large images is a part of this plan that Google has been cooking for quite a while now.
After finishing Theatrical Journalism at the Faculty of Theatre and Television in Cluj-Napoca, Rada reviewed movies, books, theatre pieces and she also wrote articles from the IT niche as a content editor for software producers. At the moment, she is working with various online advertising firms.
