Chrome still hasn't changed its opinion about dropping JPEG XL support

This is starting to feel like the IE6 situation.<p>1. Someone comes up with a cool feature.<p>2. Browser developer refuses to incorporate it since &quot;No one uses it!&quot;. Pushes developed in-house technology instead.<p>3. No one uses the feature as a result. &quot;See no one wants it!&quot;<p>4. Competitors start to implement the feature<p>5. ???<p>And no, pollyfill is again not the (right) solution.

Related:<p><i>JPEG XL support has officially been removed from Chromium</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33933208" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33933208</a> - Dec 2022 (378 comments)<p><i>Chrome Responds &quot;No&quot; to JPEG XL</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33563378" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33563378</a> - Nov 2022 (55 comments)<p><i>The case for JPEG XL</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33442281" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33442281</a> - Nov 2022 (209 comments)<p><i>Removing the JPEG XL code and flag from Chromium</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33412340" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33412340</a> - Oct 2022 (42 comments)<p><i>Chrome drops JPEG XL, “not enough interest”</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33404840" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33404840</a> - Oct 2022 (4 comments)<p><i>Google set to deprecate JPEG XL support in Chrome 110</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33399940" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33399940</a> - Oct 2022 (93 comments)<p><i>Google Chrome Is Already Preparing to Deprecate JPEG-XL</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33383880" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33383880</a> - Oct 2022 (20 comments)<p>More at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33935571" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33935571</a>

As said before, the commiter of the JXL removal is an AOM contributor, and the manager who approved it has given presentations on AV1.<p>This is politics, not a technical discussion.

The referenced comment does not even take into account that also the lossless compression is more efficient than PNG. This and the easy handling and efficient storing of (short) animations could in total combine the three major image formats: JPG, PNG and GIF.<p>Even when gifs are now mostly replaced by webm and HTML5 viideo tag, the unification of image formats for both orthogonal uses (natural images vs. technical or generated images) is a big advantage.

Discussed when it happened seven months ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33399940" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33399940</a> (2022-10-30, 146 points, 95 comments)<p>Also a few more submissions of issue 1178058:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33403430" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33403430</a> (2022-10-31, 13 points, 2 comments)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33412340" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33412340</a> (2022-11-01, 60 points, 42 comments)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33705725" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33705725</a> (2022-11-23, 32 points, 1 comments)

Posting obnoxious, demanding messages on the Chromium bug tracker is not the way to win friends &amp; influence people. It&#x27;s just an image file format for Pete&#x27;s sake.

I don&#x27;t see any comments from any Chrome developer since the Safari news, so the headline here on HN doesn&#x27;t make a whole lot of sense.

Half joking: in the world where Google added JPEG XL using the normal process, the reaction would vary from mild disinterest to outright disapproval. &quot;Google is forcing yet another image format down our throats!&quot;<p>But by adding and then removing the feature, they&#x27;ve made it a competition. Now JPEG XL is building grass-roots support, and if&#x2F;when Google relents and adds JPEG XL back, the feature will have much higher support than the boring way.

macOS 14 will support JPEG XL:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36202088" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36202088</a>

This terse comment from the bug is an accurate summary of how projects work at Google, whose side effect was JPEG XL&#x27;s removal:<p>&gt; The code has been removed from Chromium (comment #281), I&#x27;m closing this bug for now. If leadership revisits the decision [1] it can be reopened.<p>There you have it--the people making decisions are out-of-touch, likely-non-technical managers, not engineers. Engineers are the ones writing the code and shipping features. Why not empower them to make these decisions?

Give it a minute. The news that Safari would add JPEG XL just dropped yesterday. Given that big change the decision may be reconsidered, but not in one day.

Here is a recent (today) blog post from the Safari team, spelling out JXL support:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webkit.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;14205&#x2F;news-from-wwdc23-webkit-features-in-safari-17-beta&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webkit.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;14205&#x2F;news-from-wwdc23-webkit-fe...</a>

I would really like to start converting some of my personal media and websites to use JPEG XL, but the momentum doesn&#x27;t seem there yet - despite clear technical and practical benefits.

I&#x27;m curious whether Apple will eventually move away from HEIC for their camera roll and other internal uses. Now <i>that</i> would be an incredible win for royalty-free codecs.<p>As for browsers, this looks like the competition that&#x27;s needed to convince Chrome. If it gains adoption and gives Safari a performance&#x2F;quality edge that users notice, Chrome will have to follow.<p>For browser vendors, all web-exposed code is a maintenance cost, security risk, and compatibility risk, so they generally don&#x27;t add stuff just because it&#x27;s nice. But they do add stuff to beat their competitors.

Is there any benefit to JPEG XL (over other formats) other than old JPEGs can be losslessly re-encoded?

Now what would really be great is if Microsoft Edge could support AVIF. That&#x27;s the last holdout.

I don&#x27;t know why HN is so obsessed with this particular image format. Adding image formats on the web has a really high maintainability cost and there is a fairly reasonable argument that it wasn&#x27;t worth it in this case.

Looking forward to when edge services like Cloudflare, Cloudimage, imgix, etc. support JXL too. AVIF has such a harsh encoding time. It is also a bit too bulky in wasm on the edge to encode yourself too.

I was talking with a Googler on Mastodon the other day who was astonishingly ignorant about how his own product works and blaming me for it. If they were going to put a definition for &quot;gaslighting&quot; in the dictionary it might be good to put in Google&#x27;s product evangelism in as an example. There was that time I met Bing&#x27;s developer evangelist for search at a conference and told him that if he was Matt Cutts I would have called room service and ordered a cream pie.

For the next few months at least, it looks like JPEG XL is just going to be one of those formats for Apple users, like HEIC. With people complaining about programs not supporting WEBP all the time, JPEG XL isn&#x27;t going to gain much popularity in the mainstream either.<p>At least people supporting Safari will be able to make use of the format for faster load times soon; the &lt;picture&gt; element makes the transition quite painless after all.

Does anyone have a quick summary what this is all about?

Mark the bug with a star to indicate interest.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=1178058" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=117805...</a><p>Apple adding JPEG XL was one of the happiest days in my life. Thank you Apple!

Why browsers can not have features as binaries on OS? For example, I can drop Ogg Vorbis support from my Debian but one is a nightmare - if Debian&#x27;s devs would manage to dictate me what codecs I can use and what I can not.

&quot;It&#x27;s open source, just fork it.&quot;

Polyfill using Wasm. I see almost no downsides. you can even use the original code.

How does JPEG XL compare to e.g. WebP?

It&#x27;s an open source browser, right?<p>If it&#x27;s important, someone should just implement support for it.

Still never seen or used jpeg xl and I don&#x27;t know anyone using it ever.<p>I&#x27;m surprised that this is a problem at all.