Mozilla, Facebook team up to make JPEG files leaner & meaner

sincity · July 15, 2014

Netflix streaming may not be the only thing gobbling up your online bandwidth: Two internet titans are joining forces to bring renewed life to those crusty old JPEG files by cutting them down to size.

Mozilla today announced that the decades-old JPEG file format is about to get a little more efficient when it comes to bandwidth consumption, thanks to the combined resources of the creators of Firefox and social networking giant Facebook.

The new partnership builds upon the second generation of Mozilla's mozjpeg encoder, a home-brewed solution capable of shaving an average of five percent off the size of JPEG files without a noticeable loss in quality.

In many cases, Mozilla claims mozjpeg 2.0 can even reduce file sizes even further, all without having to throw the baby out with the bath water by adopting an entirely new image format specifically designed for the web.

Setback for WebP

Facebook has good reason to embrace such technology: After all, the social network processes millions of photos each and every day, and even a seemingly modest five percent could reap big rewards when it comes to bandwidth.

"We look forward to seeing the potential benefits mozjpeg 2.0 might bring in optimizing images and creating an improved experience for people to share and connect on Facebook," said Stacy Kerkela, the social network's software engineering manager.

The alliance with Facebook is likely to be viewed as another setback for Microsoft's JPEG XR and WebP, a Google-backed image format supported by Opera, which Mozilla criticized last year for failing to offer any significant improvements over JPEG, a standard that dates back to 1986.

Mozilla is actively recruiting other as-yet unnamed websites to adopt Mozjpeg 2.0, while simultaneously donating a $60,000 (about UK£34,998, AU$64,050) contribution to further develop the technology, with an eye toward Mozjpeg 3.0.