New Free Software From Google Is Making The Internet Faster For Everyone

Your internet browsing experience is about to get a little faster thanks to a new piece of software from Google. And in addition, everyone from blog owners to people with small businesses is going to save money on web storage.

The new software, called Guetzli, is an open source algorithm that creates .jpg files 35% smaller than the current method. That might not sound like a lot, but that’s a huge different for a lot of people (especially people who have data caps on their internet connection).

The concept of making the .jpg smaller isn’t a new one. The BGP format (.jpg quality file with a much smaller size) was introduced back in 2014, but never really caught on. Fast forward to today, and the .jpg is still the gold standard when it comes to online photos.

There’s one huge difference between BPG and Guetzli though. BGP required new code to be written before a browser could read it. A browsers or image program simply wouldn’t read the file if it wasn’t told how. But Guetzli uses the .jpg format that’s already in place, meaning there won’t be any issues actually reading the file.

There is a present downside though, and it’s that Guetzi loads a little slower than the standard .jpg right now. Google says they have plans to significantly lessen that time though, meaning there’s soon to be no downside to the new format.

Guetzi is still in an early stage, so there will very likely be some bugs to work out. But the real people that should worry here are programs like JPEGmini, which do the exact same thing this program will, but charge for it.

Overall, this is great news all around – for people who browse the web, for people who host content on the web, and people who store photos offline.