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Chrome Responds "No" to JPEG XL

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Re: Chrome Responds "No" to JPEG XL

#31

Post by least »

It's hard to be anything but skeptical about the intent behind this decision, considering that the competing emerging standard (WebP) is one that Google controls.

This is one reason why I am thankful that Apple still only allows webkit on iOS even if philosophically I believe people should be able to run the software they want on their phone — it's basically the only check against pure Google hegemony over the web.

> can we optimize existing formats to meet any new use-cases, rather than adding support for an additional format; do other browsers and OSes support it?

They did not show this restraint at all when it came to implementing and pushing their own formats.

Re: Chrome Responds "No" to JPEG XL

#32

Post by RedShift1 »

RedShift1 wrote: post #16

This is ridiculous. Chrome's influence is too big and Google is basically dictating how the web works. The whole world must bow to what a select group of people decide. This internet explorer level of oppression has to stop.

Sure. Downvote me. Perhaps you weren't around when IE was still a thing. As a webdesigner back in those days your job was basically working around IE6's limitations and quirks. _You couldn't even use transparant PNG's ffs_. MS didn't give a flying F and only started improving IE again when they started losing big chunks of marketshare. We are heading towards that exact same situation right now.

Re: Chrome Responds "No" to JPEG XL

#33

Post by jonsneyers »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #28
dcow wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which isn’t a real rationale. It says what some common problems are but not why specifically jpeg-xl is unfit. Are we really to believe that a new format is going to be perfect out of the gate? Surely there’s a path to introducing a new format that doesn’t screw over 3rd parties. I mean Google has been iron fisted with certain other formats… Something else happened here.

Well... within the last ~1.5 years, AVIF has become natively supported on Windows 10 and Windows 11 (Windows 1903 with a free Store extension), macOS 13 (no AV1, but yes to AVIF), iOS 16 (no AV1, also yes to AVIF), and Android 12. And in browsers, AVIF won Firefox, Safari, and Chrome all together as a default supported option, JXL did not and was only an optional feature flag in Firefox. Basically, AVIF won the OS-le…

Note a small detail you left out: all this happened to AVIF _after_ it was enabled by default in Chrome...

Re: Chrome Responds "No" to JPEG XL

#34

Post by ZeroGravitas »

alophawen wrote: post #30
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox didn't add Webp support for a long time, because it wasn't a massive, massive improvement over the existing image formats. https://research.mozilla.org/2013/10/17/studying-lossy-image... More recent coverage: https://siipo.la/blog/is-webp-really-better-than-jpeg

Neither of your links support your claim that Firefox avoided adding Webp support because it wasn't technically superiour. Instead, what happened was that WebP started to be used on the web and this broke websites for Firefox users. Since Firefox is by no means dominant on the web, we had to follow suit or lose more users.

I'm not sure what you are saying.

Mozilla didn't support WebP for years. I'm fairly certain one of the official reasons they gave for not doing it was that it wasn't a massive jump in quality over JPEG, which obviously would have been good for the web if it was true and motivation for them to support it sooner than they did.

Notably, when they did add it, Edge did so around the same time, which seems to me suggests some politics in the background, (not in a conspiracy sense, just an agreement based on interperability) which I suspect might apply this time too.

Re: Chrome Responds "No" to JPEG XL

#35

Post by edflsafoiewq »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #29
birken wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well in fairness when WebP support was added in Chrome over 10 years ago it was a massive, massive improvement over the existing image formats that were being commonly used on the web. JPEG XL's problem is that WebP has now existed for 10 years and has widespread support.

Firefox didn't add Webp support for a long time, because it wasn't a massive, massive improvement over the existing image formats. https://research.mozilla.org/2013/10/17/studying-lossy-image... More recent coverage: https://siipo.la/blog/is-webp-really-better-than-jpeg

Webp's lossy mode may be uninspiring, but it also has a good lossless mode and supported both lossy and lossless transparency.

Re: Chrome Responds "No" to JPEG XL

#36

Post by jsnell »

least wrote: post #31

It's hard to be anything but skeptical about the intent behind this decision, considering that the competing emerging standard (WebP) is one that Google controls. This is one reason why I am thankful that Apple still only allows webkit on iOS even if philosophically I believe people should be able to run the software they want on their phone — it's basically the only check against pure Google hegemony over the web. >…

This is a really strange take, because Apple does not support JPEG XL and was never going to support it. And since nobody else can bring that support to iOS either, the format as a whole is dead to the web.

(And, uh, I don't know where you're getting webp from here. The competition for this generation of image formats is AVIF; AVIF has been blessed by Apple, so no matter how distasteful it is that's what we'll get.)

> They did not show this restraint at all when it came to implementing and pushing their own formats.

JPEG XL was largely a Google-created format.

Re: Chrome Responds "No" to JPEG XL

#37

Post by jonsneyers »

jsnell wrote: post #36
least wrote: post #31

It's hard to be anything but skeptical about the intent behind this decision, considering that the competing emerging standard (WebP) is one that Google controls. This is one reason why I am thankful that Apple still only allows webkit on iOS even if philosophically I believe people should be able to run the software they want on their phone — it's basically the only check against pure Google hegemony over the web. >…

This is a really strange take, because Apple does not support JPEG XL and was never going to support it. And since nobody else can bring that support to iOS either, the format as a whole is dead to the web. (And, uh, I don't know where you're getting webp from here. The competition for this generation of image formats is AVIF; AVIF has been blessed by Apple, so no matter how distasteful it is that's what we'll get.)…

The Chrome team did not create JPEG XL, that was a totally different team. The Chrome team did create WebP and was heavily involved in the creation of AVIF.

Re: Chrome Responds "No" to JPEG XL

#38

Post by mike_hearn »

twotwotwo wrote: post #19

They have not closed a narrower bug about the lossless JPEG compression: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=110969... I think it's a legitimately different tradeoff because the recompression is not like a new lossy format--less code, plus you don't need the whole ecosystem to move, big sites and CDNs can transparently start using it--but still substantial (22% on JPEG content out there). And by bei…

The problem with using WASM is that because of their cache segmentation, every site that wants to render JXL would have to redownload the WASM decoder from scratch, and every page load that wants to render it would presumably have to JITC it from scratch too.

The WASM model doesn't seem to be a good replacement for browser plugins. Amusingly, when Chrome killed off plugins one of the rationales they gave was "reducing code complexity". The enormous bloat in the code and HTML5 specs that followed did many things, but reducing Chrome's code complexity isn't one of them.

Re: Chrome Responds "No" to JPEG XL

#39

Post by jpgvm »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #17
jpgvm wrote: post #9

So does this mean we are getting AVIF or WebP or both? It's not clear to me which is the "blessed" format out of these. HEIC is ofcourse there but proprietary.

WebP has been in Chrome for years, and isn't going anywhere. WebP2 is cancelled. AVIF is still arriving and is Chrome's preferred choice over JXL. HEIC was not supported by Chrome until recently, but only on devices where the manufacturers already paid for decoding. One advantage for AVIF is that an AVIF file is very close to just being an AV1 still, so if you implement AV1, you've basically got 95% of AVIF already.…

Thanks for a concise lay of the land, I'm curious about this stuff but not on top enough of the happenings.

Re: Chrome Responds "No" to JPEG XL

#40

Post by ZeroGravitas »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #35
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox didn't add Webp support for a long time, because it wasn't a massive, massive improvement over the existing image formats. https://research.mozilla.org/2013/10/17/studying-lossy-image... More recent coverage: https://siipo.la/blog/is-webp-really-better-than-jpeg

Webp's lossy mode may be uninspiring, but it also has a good lossless mode and supported both lossy and lossless transparency.

Worth noting that JPEG XL has a pretty good lossless mode too, however, I think in many cases you actually want to just use a lossy AVIF or JPEG XL in places you'd previously have used "lossless".

It was kind of an artificial split, much like text, alpha transparency or line drawing might be done as PNG, not because you wanted them to be "lossless" but because JPEG would mess them up due to a lack of tools for reproducing non-natural photo content.

See the lossless comparison here for more:

https://jakearchibald.com/2020/avif-has-landed/

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