[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.