Google launches advanced online image converter Squoosh
Google's Chrome Developer Conference is in full swing and one of the things that came out of it yesterday was the official unveiling of Squoosh, an online service designed to showcase new browser capabilities.
Squoosh is an online image converter at its core that converts images that you load into different image formats. While that niche is very crowded already on the Internet, Squoosh has not been designed as a competitor but as a showcase for new web technologies.
The service works in several modern web browsers and not just in Chrome; I had the impression that it runs faster in Firefox than it does in Chrome when I ran side-by-side tests.
Squoosh takes a source image and converts it into one of the supported formats. The process is automatic and it happens locally after the initial download of the application in the browser.
The app supports the formats OptiPNG, MozJPG, WebP, and Browser PNG, JPG, and WebP. A slider separates the image into the original version and the converted version on the page. You may move the slider and use zoom in and out operations to compare the quality of the input and output.
It is easy to switch to a different format and make changes to the parameters of it. Just click on the format selector and pick a new format: the app converts the image to the selected format and display it immediately in the preview area.
Options to resize the image or reduce its palette are provided independently of the selected format. Some formats support custom parameters that you may adjust. If you select WebP for example, you may check the lossless box, modify effort and slight loss parameters, and check the preserve transparent data and discrete tone image boxes.
Other formats, e.g. MozJPG, offer even more options to customize the ouput. Squoosh highlights the savings (or not) whenever you make changes to the configuration.
A click on the download button saves the converted image to the local system.
Squoosh is an open source tool by Chrome Labs. The app works in desktop and mobile browsers, and collects some data using Google Analytics. The GitHub project page states that it collects the original and processed image size rounded up to the nearest Kilobyte and "basic visit data".
Closing Words
Squoosh is a powerful image converter that showcases the use of new technologies such as WebAssembly. Its practical use is fairly limited at this point in time; while it is a good option to convert a single image to another format, it is not suited for bulk conversions.
Users and webmasters who need batch processing capabilities may want to check out Image Batch Processor for Windows, Riot, or File Optimizer.
Now You: What is your take on Squoosh?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.