[detuur]

It was/is a very well thought-out format that had a lot of industry signalling they were willing or even enthusiastic about supporting it, which happens virtually never for new image formats. All the major browsers were working on support, many image processing pipelines were being updated.

Everyone agreed that it was not just a major improvement, but actually the best option out of all the contenders out there. Even the Chrome team. The only ones who didn't agree were the AVIF team at Google, who had developed a competing standard. Well, whoever was on that team had some pull, because not long after Chrome landed JXL support in stable and everything was about to pick up some serious pace, they suddenly landed a commit that reverted everything to do with JXL support in Chrome, and that was that.

An immense, cross-industry effort undone by internal Google politics. That's what's hostile about this situation. JXL is still limping along, but Google's unilateral reversal hurt everyone's confidence in the project but also the entire process. Apparently it doesn't matter what everyone in the world thinks is the most appropriate format. What matters is Lord Google's favour.

[magicalist]

> Everyone agreed that it was not just a major improvement, but actually the best option out of all the contenders out there.

Wikipedia tells me the first of four parts of the jpeg xl standard was finalized less than two years ago, and the last part (barely) less than a year ago.

The idea that

a) browsers are bad if they're not adding a year-old image format to the web forever and

b) "everyone" knows what they're talking about with an image codec finalized less than a year ago

is pretty ludicrous.

It's a good format, it'll gain adoption.

[jillesvangurp]

A possible reason might be some patents owned by Microsoft: https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/

That's also a good reason for others to drop support until licensing of these patents is clarified.

[pilif]

> That's also a good reason for others to drop support until licensing of these patents is clarified.

If that were true, then browsers should drop support for VP8, VP9 and indeed AV1 because the MPEG-LA is claiming ownership of patents covering those codecs.

[jillesvangurp]

The rollout of that stuff took some time precisely for this reason.

[bob1029]

This is also why the original jpeg was forced to use a less-than-ideal encoding scheme (Huffman vs arithmetic). Most libraries have flags that enable the alternative mode.

Maybe we should stop issuing patents for math problems?

[jonsneyers]

Those Microsoft patents are not relevant for JPEG XL. Their licensing is therefore also not relevant for JPEG XL.