There's a lot of bandwidth being wasted every single second, and Google thinks they've got a pretty snazzy new way to tackle part of the problem. Behold! The new WebP image format!

Following in the freshly-trampled footsteps of its video cousin WebM, Google claims that average savings of about 40% over a comparable JPEG can be achieved. Curiously, the image they chose to provide CNet as an example only saved about half that.

Either way, smaller images filesizes would lead to faster Web page loading times, and a faster Web makes everyone happy, right? There's one downside, however -- encoding in WebP takes about 8 times as long as JPEG. I'm not sure I'd even notice the difference, since eight times the fraction of a second it takes Paint.Net to save a JPEG is still a fraction of a second.

If you find yourself getting all tingly-like waiting to take a look at WebP in action, you won't be waiting long. Google says native support is coming to Chrome "in a few weeks."

Overheard on our team chat: "Anyone remember JPEG2000? Lol."