The WebP team at Google focuses on making the web better through smaller, faster-loading images. We’ve seen that WebP compares favorably with other contemporary image formats, but our team has been hard at work to make WebP even faster and more capable. A few months ago, we added support for animated WebP images to Chrome, making WebP the first unified format that can address the key use cases of JPEG, PNG and GIF files. The recent release of libwebp 0.4.0, currently in Chrome’s Beta channel, is a culmination of numerous encoder and decoder optimizations that make encoding lossless images twice as fast, and decrease lossless decode time by 25%.

While the WebP team was delivering these improvements, other teams at Google have been busy deploying WebP in their own products. Google Play’s online store, redesigned mid-last year, replaced png images with lossless WebP, reducing image file sizes by nearly 35%. Another major WebP rollout is currently in progress: YouTube video thumbnails are starting to be served in WebP with initial results indicating up to a 10% reduction in page load time.

All the rollouts within Google combined have raised our aggregate data transfer savings tally to tens of terabytes every day. For users, this translates into faster page load times and fewer bytes counted against metered data plans. To speed up browsing on sites that don’t serve WebP yet, Chrome for Android and iOS can use Chrome’s Data Compression Proxy, which transcodes images to WebP on the fly in order to deliver image compression of over 60%.

To developers outside of Google, the data transfer savings and user benefits of WebP are within easy reach. Growing support from CDNs and accept content negotiation make it easier than ever to enable wide scale, seamless delivery of WebP images to Chrome users. To find out more, visit the WebP developer site or reach out to us using our public discussion group.

Posted by Husain Bengali, Product Manager and WebP Optimizer

Browser settings hijacking continues to be a top issue for Chrome users, particularly on Windows. A user’s start page, home page and default search engine are critical parts of their Chrome experience, so we are creating an extension-based Settings API for Chrome on Windows to ensure all users have notice and control over any settings changes that take place in their browser. We expect to release this API to the Stable channel in May, after which it will be the only way for developers to make programmatic settings changes in Chrome on Windows. The API is available now on the Windows Dev channel.

If your software relies on making changes to user settings within Chrome as part of its feature set, make sure you begin moving your code to use this new API now and send us your feedback.

Update May 16, 2014: We won't be restricting other methods of changing settings until Chrome 36 which should be released around mid-July. This should give you another full release cycle to switch over to the new API.

Posted by Erik Kay, Engineering Director

As a developer, you should spend as much of your development time as possible creating great content and services — not managing overhead. Today we're announcing new tools and services in the Chrome Web Store that make it easier to automate the publish process and monetize all of your Chrome Web Store items.

Table 1: Chrome Web Store (CWS) monetization methods by item type


The Managed In-App Payments feature simplifies the developer experience of our previous solution and expands it to extensions. You can now create and manage all of your in-app products directly in the developer dashboard instead of having to embed or dynamically generate and serve a payment token for each sale. You can enable or disable products, provide localized descriptions, set prices for different regions and the Chrome Web Store manages the licensing.


The Free Trial feature, which is now available for Chrome Packaged Apps and Extensions, allows a developer to specify that an item can be used for a limited time before it must be purchased. This gives users the flexibility to try paid items before deciding to buy them.

In addition to making it easier to monetize your Web Store items, we have now made it easier to publish them. Our Chrome Web Store API has been expanded to allow developers to programmatically create, update and publish items in the Web Store. If you have an automated build and deployment process, we hope you will be able to use this API to integrate the Web Store publishing flow into your existing process.

We’re excited to release these new features, so please give them a try and send your feedback via Stack Overflow, our G+ Developers page, or our developer forum.

Posted by Chary Chen, Software Engineer & developer delighter