Mozilla Launches 'mozjpeg' JPEG Encoder To Reduce Webpage Loads

JPEG has been in the market for quite a long time and it has been showing no signs of disappearing. It is the only lossy compression format which has achieved universal compatibility across all the browsers and software that can display images. That is the reason why Mozilla has announced a new project called mozjpeg, which promises to reduce the file size by up to 10% and aims to compress images more intelligently. The goal of this project is to provide a production-quality JPEG encoder that improves compression rates. However, the company wants to continue compatibility with the majority of deployed decoders.

According to a report, since HTML, CSS, JS files are relatively smaller, Mozilla points out that images make up for the bulk of network traffic for a web page to load. Smaller the file size faster will the web pages load. Moreover, JPEG has been ruling the image compression format across the globe since 1992, so the company wants to reduce the size of these files for optimization and reduce load on the network. Therefore, Mozilla feels that optimization of the compression format is worth trying, even with search on for a better successor.


This will be challenging for libjpeg-turbo, an existing open-source toolthat is used to create JPEGs. Mozjpeg version 1.0 comes with ‘jpgcrush’ functionality added, that picks the best compression options without sacrificing the image quality. Mozilla has conducted tests shows that the encoder squeezes 10 percent off a sample of 1,500 images on Wikimedia. Further, mozjpeg can also compress PNG file sizes by 2 to 6 percent. Google has also tried to improve the web speed by including a variety of new graphics format like WebP but so far Mozilla does not use WebP. The mozjpeg software is now at version 1.0 but more updates are likely to be added- Trellis quantization being one of them.

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Source: #-Link-Snipped-# | #-Link-Snipped-# | GitHub - mozilla/mozjpeg: Improved JPEG encoder.