Google has announced the support for WebP, a new image compression technology similar to lossy JPEG, to its products including Gmail and Picasa Web Albums. Google has also added native support for the format to its Chrome browser. Opera, a non-free/proprietary browser has also announced the support for the format.

Google products now have native support for WebP so that users can share, send and receive WebP images. Google is also brining the WebP support is coming to AppEngine.

Google has now started using WebP to store images for Google Instant Previews, which the company claims reduces their storage needs.

Google has also "introduced the ability to incrementally decode the data as your computer downloads it from the web, a feature that allows the browser to display images without having to wait for the whole file to download. This feature is already enabled in Chrome 12," says a Google blog.

Google recently announced that YouTube is making a switch from proprietary H.264 to WebM for its videos.

What do you think of WebP when compared with Jpeg or Microsoft's Jpeg-xr?