Meet Mozjpeg, Mozilla’s JPEG Encoder Project

Finally, something other than JavaScript.

Recently, Mozilla has announced a new project called “mozjpeg’”, which aims to improve the overall compression of JPEG images, hence also enhancing web page load times.

So what they did so far was to take a fork of libjpeg-turbo (a JPEG image codec that uses SIMD instructions (MMX, SSE2, NEON) to accelerate baseline JPEG compression and decompression) and combine it with ‘jpgcrush’, which, according to Mozilla, reduced the overall sample size of 1500 JPEG images from Wikipedia by 10%.

So what’s next and how did the open source organization got into this? Well, according to Mozilla, they were wondering “if JPEG encoders have really reached their full compression potential after 20+ years. We talked to a number of engineers, and concluded that the answer is “no,” even within the constraints of strong compatibility requirements. With feedback on promising avenues for exploration in hand, we started the ‘mozjpeg’ project.”.

So here you have it, a pretty awesome initiative, if you ask us.