title: What advantages are there for Google to send images as Base64 rather than e.g. jpg
body: <p>I noticed that Google's new page preview gets it's images using base64 rather than plain e.g. jpgs or png's</p>
  
  <p>What are the advantages of doing this?</p>
  
  <p>Can base64 encoded images be compressed better during transit?</p>
  
  <p>Or perhaps cached better by the browser or caching proxy?</p>
  
  <p>Is it so they can do one HTTP request and receive the image and information about the image in one hit?</p>
  
  <p>Any other ideas?</p>
  
  <p>[EDIT]</p>
  
  <p>I've just had a thought, maybe it's so google can use their new image format </p>
  
  <p><a href="http://code.google.com/speed/webp/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/speed/webp/</a> without support from browsers?</p>
  
  <p>However looking at the string returned (using the fiddler to intercept the http traffic), the string mentions "image/jpeg". Unless some images are returned in webp format.</p>