Though streaming video is a bigger user of bandwidth overall, it's images, not video, that are the big bandwidth user during regular browsing. A big proportion of this bandwidth is taken by lossy image formats, specifically JPEG, used to shrink photographic pictures to a more download-friendly size. The desire to make these images smaller—and hence faster to download—has inspired a lot of investigation to determine if some other format might do the job better.
Google has been promoting the use of WebP, the still image derivative of its WebM video codec. Mozilla has also been looking at the issue, but the open source browser organization has come up with a different conclusion: we don't need a new image format, we just need to make better JPEGs.
To that end, the group has released its own JPEG compression library, mozjpeg 2.0, which reduces file sizes by around five percent compared to the widely used libjpeg-turbo. Facebook has announced that it will be testing mozjpeg 2.0 to reduce its bandwidth costs, similar to its WebP trial.
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