Facebook announced today that they are testing Mozilla's mozjpeg 2.0 JPEG encoder to improve the compression of images on facebook.com. The social network has also donated $60,000 to contribute to the ongoing development of the technology, including the next iteration, mozjpeg 3.0.

"Facebook supports the work Mozilla has done in building a JPEG encoder that can create smaller JPEGs without compromising the visual quality of photos," said Stacy Kerkela, software engineering manager at Facebook. "We look forward to seeing the potential benefits mozjpeg 2.0 might bring in optimizing images and creating an improved experience for people to share and connect on Facebook."

Mozilla started mozjpeg earlier this year to provide a production-quality JPEG encoder that improves compression while maintaining compatibility with the vast majority of deployed decoders. The end goal is to reduce page load times for sites hosting images.

According to mozilla, the latest mozjpeg 2.0 release can reduce file sizes for both baseline and progressive JPEGs by 5% on average compared to those produced by libjpeg-turbo, the standard JPEG library upon which mozjpeg is based.

The major feature in the latest release is trellis quantization, which improves compression for both baseline and progressive JPEGs without sacrificing anything in terms of compatibility. Previous versions of mozjpeg only improved compression for progressive JPEGs