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Google recently introduced its own image format - the new format is called WebP.

WebP has a lot in common with JPEG. Like JPEG, the new format is designed to display photos on web pages, and like JPEG, WebP photos are compressed using lossy technology - the more you compress a photo, the lower its quality.

Google claims that images in WebP format will be 39.8% lighter than similar images in JPEG format without any visible loss of quality. The new format has been tested over the past few months, processing a total of about a million images from the Web - most often in JPEG format, but also a certain number of PNG and GIF. There is a possibility that the difference with JPEG in 39% of the image weight is not a limit for developers and they are sure that if they initially use uncompressed images, then the results will be even better.

WebP uses smart encoding technology to encode images. The same technology is used in the VP8 video codec to compress key frames in video. Smart coding uses the values in neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the value in the block and then only codes the difference (residual) between the actual values and the prediction. Residuals usually contain many null values, which can be compressed much more efficiently. Then the residual data is converted and encoded as usual. WebP also uses variable block sizes.

At the moment, there is only the first release of the format, and in addition to the usual work on improvements, a Webkit patch is being developed to provide native support for the new format in the Chrome browser.

WebP is currently in Developer Preview and is therefore not supported by any of the popular browsers, device manufacturers or software in which we usually use the JPEG format - Photoshop or iPhoto. No doubt Google will soon build the format into its Chrome browser and Picassa Photo, but it needs the support of every key player in browsers, photo software and hardware to make any sense. So right now, WebP doesn't pose a major problem for JPEGs. Although in the future everything is possible.

Images are the bulk (by weight) of useful information on a web page, and if a page is slow to load, then most often it is because of the photos. In general, the industry has been trying to solve the problem of page loading speed, and this issue has become even more acute with the boom in mobile technology, mobile Internet and growing disillusionment with the capabilities of cellular networks in matters of transferring graphic data.

But since the new image format is an open technology and is based on technological developments with which the Web is already more or less familiar, there is still a high probability of a bright future for it. The first step is support in Google Chrome, then it's a question of getting "approval" from Mozilla, Opera, Apple and Microsoft to include the format in their browsers. Considering that most of these companies were immediately ready to accept the WebM video format, then there should not be any particular problems now.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) conducted the first official tests of browsers for compliance with HTML5 standards. It turned out that Microsoft is the best at supporting new standards. Tests were run on Google Chrome (7.0.517.41 beta), Firefox 4 (Beta 6), Opera 10.60, and Safari 5 (5.0.7533.16), as well as the latest Internet Explorer 9 platform preview. five groups of tests out of seven (100% result) and good in the remaining two. Other browsers performed worse in the tests.

True, there is some remark: the tests do not yet cover all the specifications of the HTML5 standard. Therefore, it remains to be seen how the same browsers will behave in the missing categories.

Some idea of what the real picture is in the area of HTML5 compliance is given by the independent tests html5test. The same Internet Explorer Platform Preview 6 scores only 106 points out of 300 (plus 5 bonuses), while, for example, Google Chrome 7 beta scores 231 points and 12 bonuses. Note that just in the categories that are not yet in the W3C tests, IE has very weak performance.

Needless to say, the IE development team is hard at work, which is why the IE9 beta is an unexpectedly pleasant experience.

In total, there are 6 different tags for inserting headings - h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 (h is short for heading). Each of them has a certain weight (importance): h1 - has the greatest importance, h6 - the least. But how to use these headlines correctly is one of the most controversial topics. Now let's try to sort out some controversial points.

Microsoft, which has been trying to bring Silverlight to the web for a long time, decided to spend less effort on this direction and focus more on HTML5 support.

Microsoft's president of the server business, Bob Muglia, recently confirmed that the company is undergoing a global reassessment, moving away from Silverlight development towards fuller support for HTML5.

Silverlight was one of the important Internet technologies for Microsoft, but the company decided that a more universal and cross-platform standard was needed, such as HTML5. Silverlight will still be usable on the Mac, and with a few tweaks on Linux, but the company wants to build on a more universal standard that can be used on the same iPad, iPhone, and for now, it's only possible for HTML5.

In principle, this is to be expected, especially after the company announced that Internet Explorer 9 will support all the latest features of HTML5.

In September 2010, Google's share of global Internet traffic rose to 6.4%, which can be considered a record value. There was only one provider that Google could not bypass. In January, the company had 5% of global traffic. With the Internet growing by 40-45%, their total traffic increased by about 80% in just nine months. It is noteworthy that at the same time, the company's infrastructure, with a huge influx of visitors, works almost without failures. Information obtained from measurements on 110+ISP routers around the world, which feed data into the ATLAS system (a huge Internet monitoring system). The statistics did not take into account traffic deliveries under peer-to-peer agreements with lower-level ISPs. If we take into account the use of Google Global Cache, then according to Arbor Networks experts, Google's share is about 8-12%. Google has already entered into agreements with 70% of all global providers (a year ago - with 60%). Only a few operators have not installed servers with Google cache. These are Tier 1 and some national (due to government restrictions). It's safe to say that Google already controls a significant portion of the Internet and is actively infiltrating the network infrastructure.