[yason]

Yet, I think it's really hard to change what has stuck. The gains have to be enormous to warrant the hassle of trying to keep publishing in and supporting a new image format until it just works for everyone.

The reason we have PNG and JPEG is that they are, all in all, more than good enough. Yes, the dreaded "good enough" argument surfaces again stronger than ever. They are also easy to understand, i.e. use JPEG for lossy photos and PNG for pixel-exact graphics. But most importantly they both compress substantially in comparison to uncompressed images (like TIFF) and both have long ago reached the level of compression where improving compression is mostly about diminishing gains.

As there's less and less data left to compress further the compression ratio would need to go higher and higher for the new algorithm to make even a dent in JPEG or PNG in any practical sense.

Also, image compression algorithms try to solve a problem that has been gradually made less and less important each year with faster network connections. Improvements in image compression efficiency are way outrun by improvements in the network bandwidth in the last 20 years. The available memory and disk space have grown enormously as well.

For example, it's not so much of a problem if a background image of a website compresses down to 500Kb rather than 400Kb because the web page itself is 10M and always takes 10 seconds to load regardless of which decade it is. If you could squeeze a half-a-megabyte off the website's image data the site wouldn't effectively be any faster because of that (but maybe marginally so to allow the publisher to add another half-a-megabyte of ads or other useless crap instead.

[jillesvangurp]

The reason we have jpeg is because png is not good enough for photos and people prefer the lossy compression of jpeg over using png. The reason other lossy formats are struggling is because they are still lossy. This promises to basically be good enough for just about anything. That sounds like a big promise but if true, there's very little stopping major browser implementing support for this. I'd say progressive decompression sounds like a nice feature to have for photo websites.

Compression is still majorly important on mobile. Mobile coverage is mostly not great except maybe in bigger cities where you get to share the coverage with millions of others. Also mobile providers still throttle connections, bill per GB, etc. So, it matters. E.g. Instagram adopting this could be a big deal. All the major companies are looking to cut bandwidth cost. That's also what's driving progress for video codecs. With 4K and 8K screens becoming more common, jpeg is maybe not good enough anymore.

[GoblinSlayer]

File size matters for networks, not compression. Compressors have an interface where you specify desired file size and the program tries to produce a file of that size. With better compression algorithm the image will be just of a better quality, time to download and cost per GB will be the same.

[spider-mario]

> Compressors have an interface where you specify desired file size and the program tries to produce a file of that size.

That’s not really the case for JPEG XL, where the main parameter of the reference encoder is in fact a target quality. There is a setting to target a certain file size, but it just runs a search on the quality setting to use.

[jillesvangurp]

This algorithm is supposedly lossless and requires no fiddling with such settings. So a good enough non lossy algorithm could be quite disruptive. Of course with a lossy algorithm, if you throw enough detail away it's going to be smaller.

[ubercow13]

With the amount of images readily available on the internet with easily visible JPEG compression artifacts, and sometimes the difficulty of finding images without such, I would say there is still quite a lot to gain from better image formats.

[GoblinSlayer]

If it supports lossy compression, I'm sure you can have a heavily compressed text in that lossy format.

[GoblinSlayer]

Image size won't reduce anyway. People will keep uploading images of the maximum allowed size, just in better quality.