[gulikoza]

JPEG is 30 years old so we need something more modern (better compression, less visual artifacts, web optimized, etc...). There already was a plan to change it with JPEG 2000, but it failed, obviously, as we still use jpegs.

Now several formats are competing, most notably AVIF (which is basically just single AV1 video compressed frame) and JPEG XL. JPEG XL might be slightly better in some cases (as AVIF is based on a video codec) and most importantly it's backwards compatible with JPEG. So this means we can re-encode 30 years of JPEGs to JPEG XL without image degradation. Having a wide support would help immensely to make the format standard as otherwise everybody will just continue to use JPEGs. Google is somewhat against this as they already have support for AV1 and thus don't need to maintain a separate codec for JPEG XL.

[JyrkiAlakuijala]

Google Research is developing and maintaining JPEG XL, including a Chromium patch, without having expressed future maintenance cost worries.

[purpleblue]

Thank you! A lot of the context was lost for me!