[zokier]

I think the significance of compatibility is increasingly diminishing due the effect of "clouds" and other walled gardens that handle your data in a more integrated manner. With the advent of wasm etc it is not completely unreasonable to ship your own image decoder with the application, and optionally a JPEG encoder for on-demand client side re-encoding for exporting images.

There is just less expectations to be able to interoperate via "dumb files" in the "app ecosystem" where the apps run in their own isolated sandboxes and import/export are explicit actions.

Not saying that this is the best thing, but the situation is different enough from the time when WebP/WMP were introduced that HEIF actually might have a fighting chance. The fact that HEIF appears to be far bigger improvement over JPEG than previous efforts of course also helps.

[TheCoreh]

Shipping a JPEG encoder is not necessary: all browsers support encoding images via toDataURL('image/jpeg') and toBlob(...)

[nomel]

I think he meant non-standard, and if not, his point still stands: with webasm, you might not have to worry about silly client side things like codecs.