Squoosh is the name of the Web app created and published by the team working on Chrome, whose job is to compress images reducing its weight without compromising its quality. A tool aimed at webmasters and users, which in comparison to the many alternatives already available and which perform the same operation has some indisputable strengths: it is open source, it works within any browser (desktop or mobile) and also in offline mode .
Squoosh optimizes images
Usage is pretty simple. Just go to the squoosh.app address and wait for the interface to load. From that moment the tool, based on WebAssembly, is functional even in the absence of an Internet connection. The main screen allows you to load any image present in the internal memory of the smartphone or in the hard disk of the computer, after which you are faced with a real editor. The UI is divided into two parts, so as to show the quality difference between the original file and the one generated by Squoosh, with a 1: 1 magnification in order to appreciate every detail in detail.
Among the parameters to be used to decrease the file size, the one for resizing (with the possibility to specify the desired resolution), the reduction of the color palette, the selection of the output format, a slider to raise or lower the quality and Advanced settings such as grayscale conversion or progressive rendering.
Once editing is complete, the file can be exported. THE supported formats they are JPG, MozJPEG, WebP and PNG, while on Firefox BMP is added and on Safari also JPEG2000, TIFF, BMP, PDF and GIF.
Squoosh is unlikely to change the balance of the great Net and help solve the problem of heavy images deposited on servers. In any case, this is yet another effort made by Google in order to optimize the use of online resources, in line with projects such as AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and with initiatives such as WebP or Guetzli which aim (until now without having been particularly successful) to make the traditional JPEG obsolete for image distribution on the Web.
Source: Squoosh Squoosh, Google web app that compresses images
