[jez]

> I sincerely hope this might make Chrome change its mind.

I take this to suggest that Chrome actively decided against implementing JPEG XL? Did they consider supporting it and reject support for it, or has it simply not been prioritized, but still might be prioritized one day?

If the decision was intentional: did they state a reason why?

[cjawdb]

This is the terrible explanation they gave for dropping support:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...

"Thank you everyone for your comments and feedback regarding JPEG XL. We will be removing the JPEG XL code and flag from Chromium for the following reasons:

- Experimental flags and code should not remain indefinitely

- There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL

- The new image format does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats to warrant enabling it by default

- By removing the flag and the code in M110, it reduces the maintenance burden and allows us to focus on improving existing formats in Chrome"

The issue on the Chromium tracker is now one of the most-starred and most-commented-on of all time because people from all over came to tell Google that they're insane, from Intel to Adobe to Facebook to Krita to Cloudinary to Shopify to Serif/Affinity to the VESA DisplayHDR Chairman.

It may also be worth noting that the author of commit to remove support from Chromium appears to be a WebP co-author, having given talks about WebP and being the primary contributor to libwebp.

https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/40...

https://chromium.googlesource.com/webm/libwebp/+log

[account42]

WebP and libwebp/cwebp is such a clusterfuck. Lossless mode isn't even visually lossless because cwebp doesn't understand how PNGs encode color space information. Default lossy settings are extremely garbage for darker (parts of images) images - a problem that has plagued video codecs (which is what webp is based on) for a long time. Animated webp is ridiculously inefficient compared to webm and really shouldn't be a thing at all in favor of allowing silent+looping videos in image tags. And of course initial webp browser implementations don't even support animated webp but still claim support for image/webp so you can't even do progressive enhancement from gif to animated webp without hardcoding which browsers support what.

At this point it should really just be deprecated in favor of JPEG XL. And let's skip AVIF completely please.

[cjawdb]

100% agree. I'd say JXL is going to be the closest thing we get to a universal image format for quite some time. Almost completely superior to JPEG/PNG/GIF/WebP/etc. and clearly superior to AVIF in basically every way except very low bitrates and animation (which... just use HTML5 video with AV1 webms, what are you even doing?).

Oh, and adoption rates, but considering JXL's standard was finalized less than a year ago and it's already gotten support in so many things and from so many large companies, I really don't see any way that it fails other than Google abusing their monopolistic position in the browser engine space. The people arguing against adding support for a brand new codec because it doesn't magically have 100% support is circular reasoning and feels very disingenuous considering WebP and AVIF were never held to the same standard.

[ksec]

>At this point it should really just be deprecated in favor of JPEG XL. And let's skip AVIF completely please.

You say that now, try doing that between 2020 all the way to 2022 you get attacked by AOM Strike Force.

[derefr]

They did all the work required to implement it, sat around for a few months, and then removed it, before anyone else even noticed it was there / had a chance to start integrating it.

My personal conspiracy theory is that some Google engineer who works on Chrome, came up with "JPEG XL support" as a feature they could work on, pushed it through to prod, patted themselves on the back, and forgot about it; but this was all done without first getting sign-off from whoever at Google is trying to push for WebP to be a thing. When that person or group noticed "Chrome now supports JPEG XL", they got that support ripped out.

[lonjil]

The work wasn't done by anyone on the Chrome team. Someone at Google Research Zurich (I don't recall who) wrote the patches and submitted them. Actually, I think that they've even kept the patches up to date with newer Chrome releases so in theory it would be easy to re-introduce JXL into Chrome if there is a will to do it...

[kps]

Added in https://crrev.com/c/2749318

[DannyBee]

The number of people in this thread pretending they have more expertise about this, and spreading random conspiracy theories about WebP, is impressive.

Actually, Google employs 2 of the 3 main authors of the JPEG XL spec, and the main contributors to libjxl.

Also, it wasn't a few months, and others had explicitly said no.

You can argue it was a dumb decision, but like, can we at least get facts straight instead of making up random stories?

There people in this thread arguing they have no idea what they are doing and have no expertise, while they simultaneously employ the spec authors to work on it and are one of the two primary contributors to the reference library.

A bit silly and incongruous.

Just because someone does something you don't like doesn't make them stupid or wrong. You'd be much better off if you would gather facts first, listen to the perspectives of others, and then respond.

[lonjil]

> Actually, Google employs 2 of the 3 main authors of the JPEG XL spec, and the main contributors to libjxl.

> There people in this thread arguing they have no idea what they are doing and have no expertise, while they simultaneously employ the spec authors to work on it and are one of the two primary contributors to the reference library.

Google is not a monolith. The JXL people are at Google Research Zurich, while the people who decided to not include JXL in Chrome are members of the Chrome team. The Chrome team obviously does not employ the people over in Zurich, nor do they presumably control what they work on.

[ksec]

I am sorry but Google's rationale and comparison [1] between JpegXL and WebP is even more impressive.

And much like Microsoft, I will put any research arm of a company as a separate company.

[1] http://storage.googleapis.com/avif-comparison/index.html

[account42]

Companies participating in standards bodies while actively sabotaging the standards is nothing new.

[asddubs]

it was also only ever hidden behind a flag

[themerone]

The Googlers behind webp have more clout than the Googlers behind Jpeg XL.

JPEG XL has gained broader industry interest than any of the previous attempts to replace JPEG.

I think someone is very hurt that their web p pet project has earned more hate than love

[csnover]

From April: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/free-software-group-...

Discussed several times previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35589179

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33399940

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563378

[ksec]

>If the decision was intentional: did they state a reason why?

Yes It was intentional.

They stated AVIF is as good if not better than JPEG XL.