WebP (pronounced “weppy”) is a new lossy image format created by Google that’s intended to make the web faster and better looking by producing smaller images. According to Google’s study, WebP images are nearly 40% smaller than JPEGs of a similar quality.
Opera’s Turbo mode improves browsing speed by four times or more by using proxy servers to compress web pages. In Opera 11, this meant a reduction in image quality, but it’s much better in Opera 11.10’s Turbo mode thanks to WebP. Opera says the new Turbo produces 35% smaller pages and is 15% faster than the old one.
The 11.10 final release comes less than a month after the 11.10 beta release, whose feature additions included support for CSS3 Multi-Column Layout, CSS3 linear gradients, the URL Filter API for extensions and Web Open Font Format.
On top of these, the 11.10 final release also includes partial support for the W3C’s File API, HTML5 Custom Data Attributes and plenty of goodies for those developing Opera extensions.
The new version is available for desktop only at present, though the speed improvements would be even more welcome on the mobile platform.
