3w ago

JPEG XL is Dead. Long Live JPEG XL

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/WjCKcBw219k/m/NmOyvMCCBAAJ?pli=1

71 comments

Given these positive signals, we would welcome contributions
Poor Google doesn't have the manpower to implement it. They can only accept contributions from volunteers.
- Google is just a small indie company after all.
- Don't worry, they can spare some 20 percent time

Given these positive signals
Those idiots waited for 4 years because they followed the hype of the moment. I'm glad I removed Google from my life.
- This must be your first time seeing what Google support looks like
  This is pretty standard unless you can get an exec’s personal attention.
  
  https://killedbygoogle.com/

"we would welcome contributions to integrate a performant and memory-safe JPEG XL decoder in Chromium. In order to enable it by default in Chromium we would need a commitment to long-term maintenance."
yeah
- I.e. the existing implementation is not usable because it's not written in rust
  
  Or would they demand it in Go? Or have they abandoned that?

The name of the format makes me think it's regular jpeg, but bigger. Wouldn't it be better to be smaller? 🤔
- No. They increased the max "canvas" size and increased encoding efficiency. You'd want the file size to be smaller but the file itself to be larger (and consequently more detailed)
- It's even more confusing than that; the X is for revision 10, and the L is for long term.
  It's an update to the JPEG standard intended to cover expected future uses and capabilities.
  
  ~~"10 LTS"?~~
- In my personal tests of jxl, it manages filesizes 1/9th that of png while remaining visually identical (unless looking VERY closely). It's a massive improvement over jpeg and honestly a replacement for png in most cases.
  Like I'm saying 8MB for a 8000x6000 file at max quality (estimating from memory)

Finally.

I just want a picture of a got-dang hot dog.

Everyone should just be using AV1 at this point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1
- I assume you mean AVIF? Because AV1 is not an image (file) format but a video compression format (that needs to be wrapped in container file formats to be storable).
  
  "AVIF is an image file format that uses AV1 compression algorithms." yes i mean that
- please god no

I would be more excited about JPEG XL if it was backward compatible. Not looking forward to yet another image standard that requires OS and hardware upgrades simply so servers can save a few bytes.
- How would a new format be backwards-compatible? At least JPEG-XL can losslessly compress standard jpg for a bit of space savings, and servers can choose to deliver the decompressed jpg to clients that don't support JPEG-XL.
  Also from Wikipedia:
  Computationally efficient encoding and decoding without requiring specialized hardware: JPEG XL is about as fast to encode and decode as old JPEG using libjpeg-turbo
  Being a JPEG superset, JXL provides efficient lossless recompression options for images in the traditional/legacy JPEG format that can represent JPEG data in a more space-efficient way (~20% size reduction due to the better entropy coder) and can easily be reversed, e.g. on the fly. Wrapped inside a JPEG XL file/stream, it can be combined with additional elements, e.g. an alpha channel.
  
  All you have to do is add a small traditional JPEG image at the start of the file. It doesn’t have to be high resolution or more than a couple of kb. The new format decoder would know this, and skip the traditional jpeg “header”, rendering the newer file format embedded in the image.
- It requires neither of those upgrades though? Unless you're still using Windows XP I guess for some reason. It's just an update to the image decoder
- What does backward compability in image format even means? Being able to open it in windows image viewer?

I just use old JPEGs. Not JPEG2000, not PNG, not WebP, not JPEG XL.
- Feel free to use floppy disks. Btw if you are online, you use WebP and PNG all the time 🤣
  
  Sir, don't you dare encroach on those Lynx and W3M users. They don't need no stinking images!
  
  Not if they use wget to only download the HTML!
  
  If you are using Firefox:
  Enter the following in the address bar: about:config
  Search for: image.webp.enabled
  Set it to false Websites are delivering JPG/PNG instead of WebP again.
  
  AVIF started heavily creeping in, too.
  
  No, I have WebP blocked in my about:config. And I use Pale Moon, which actually blocks the things unlike modern FF. And I don't load PNG either.
- Why though
  
  Because I'm tired of all this nonsense where just because a thing is a mature technology, it's considered obsolete. Stop constantly pushing for the next thing. Keep the things that work.
- Oh yeah? Well I named my firstborn child JPEG!

71 comments