Squooshing Your Pictures With Google’s New Open Source Image Tool Is A Good Thing

The Chrome Dev Summit 2018 event is underway now, and one of the big focuses of the event is making the web faster and smoother. One of the ways Google's Chromium team is going to make this happen is with a new tool called Squoosh, a powerful image compression tool that launches almost instantly and offers a simple, fast UI, even when it’s working hard. The app offers compression and conversion between image formats like PNG, JPG and WebP with multiple compression algorithms to choose from.

The Squoosh web app works in any browser but of course Google recommends Chrome for the best experience. Regardless, the tool also gives you the ability and options for resizing, smoothing and dithering for images, along with color palette reduction, to get file sizes down and ready for web publication. There's even a slider to live proof your changes versus the original image. Users wanting to try the Squoosh app (GitHub source) can check it out here and the software is fully open source. The video below gives an idea of how the app works. Also, Squoosh isn’t all that Google's Chromium team is working on to make the web faster and smoother. It also notes that it is expanding Desktop PWA (Progressive Web App) support across Chrome for Windows and Linux, with Mac support expected in Chrome 72. Previously, PWAs were mostly for mobile devices.

Chromium is also helping web developers to develop content  by giving them one place to consolidate all the reference information for modern Web APIs. Chromium is collaborating with Mozilla Developer Network to improve the core reference documentation for the web; all of this is consolidated in one place called web.dev by Google.