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Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal

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Re: Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal

#11
2026 is nearly upon us, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple remain steadfast in the refusal to ever allow anyone to share wide-gamut or HDR images.

Every year, I go on a rant about how my camera can take HDR images natively, but the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube.

It's absolutely bonkers to me that we've all collectively figured out how to stream a Hollywood movie to a pocket device over radio with a quality exceeding that of a typical cinema theatre, but these multi-trillion market cap corporations have all utterly failed to allow users to reliably send a still image with the same quality to each other!

Any year now, maybe in 2030s, someone will get around to a ticket that is currently at position 11,372 down the list below thousands of internal bullshit that nobody needed done, rearranging a dashboard nobody has ever opened, or whatever, and get around to letting computers be used for images. You know, utilising the screen, the only part billions of users ever look at, with their human eyes.

I can't politely express my disgust at the ineptitude, the sloth, the foot dragging, the uncaring unprofessionalism of people that get paid more annually then I get in a decade who are all too distracted making Clippy 2.0 instead of getting right the most utterly fundamental aspect of consumer computing.

If I could wave a magic wand, I would force a dev team from each of these companies to remain locked in a room until this was sorted out.

Re: Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal

#12
I think the article is slightly misleading: it says "Google has resumed work on JPEG XL", but I don't think they have - their announcement only says they "would welcome contributions" to implement JPEG XL support. In other words, Google won't do it themselves, but their new position is they're now willing to allow someone else to do the work.

Re: Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal

#13

2026 is nearly upon us, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple remain steadfast in the refusal to ever allow anyone to share wide-gamut or HDR images. Every year, I go on a rant about how my camera can take HDR images natively, but the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube. It's absolutely bonkers to me that we've all collectiv…

It is incredibly annoying that instead of adopting JpegXL they decided to use UltraHDR. A giant hack which works very poorly.

Re: Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal

#14
post #13

2026 is nearly upon us, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple remain steadfast in the refusal to ever allow anyone to share wide-gamut or HDR images. Every year, I go on a rant about how my camera can take HDR images natively, but the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube. It's absolutely bonkers to me that we've all collectiv…

It is incredibly annoying that instead of adopting JpegXL they decided to use UltraHDR. A giant hack which works very poorly.

> A giant hack which works very poorly.

Indeed. I tried every possible export format from Adobe Lightroom including JPG + HDR gainmaps, and it looks... potato.

With a narrow gamut like sRGB it looks only slightly better than JPG, but with a wider gamut you get terrible posterization. People's faces turn grey and green and blue skies get bands across them.

Meanwhile my iPhone creates flawless 10-bit Dolby Vision video with the press of a button that I can share with anyone without it turning into a garbled mess.

Just last week I checked up on the "state of the art" for HDR still image sharing with Gemini Deep Research and after ten minutes of trawling through obscure forum posts it came back with a blunt "No".

We've figured out how to make machines think, but not how to exchange pictures in the quality that my 12-year-old DSLR is capable of capturing!

... unless I make a YouTube video with the images. That -- and only that -- works!

Re: Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal

#15

2026 is nearly upon us, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple remain steadfast in the refusal to ever allow anyone to share wide-gamut or HDR images. Every year, I go on a rant about how my camera can take HDR images natively, but the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube. It's absolutely bonkers to me that we've all collectiv…

> the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube

i understand some of this frustration, but really you just have to use ffmpeg to convert it to a web format (which can be done by ffmpeg.js running in a service worker if your cpu is expensive) and spell > I can't politely express my disgust at the ineptitude, the sloth, the foot dragging, the uncaring unprofessionalism of people that get paid more annually then I get in a decade who are all too distracted making Clippy 2.0 instead of getting right the most utterly fundamental aspect of consumer computing.

hear hear

> If I could wave a magic wand, I would force a dev team from each of these companies to remain locked in a room until this was sorted out.

i can think of a few better uses for such a wand...

Re: Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal

#16

I think the article is slightly misleading: it says "Google has resumed work on JPEG XL", but I don't think they have - their announcement only says they "would welcome contributions" to implement JPEG XL support. In other words, Google won't do it themselves, but their new position is they're now willing to allow someone else to do the work.

It's technically correct. Googlers (at Google Research Zurich) have been working on jxl-rs, a Rust implementation of JPEG XL. Google Research has been involved in JPEG XL from the beginning, both in the design of the codec and in the implementation of libjxl and now jxl-rs.

But until now, the position of other Googlers (in the Chrome team) was that they didn't want to have JPEG XL support in Chrome. And that changed now. Which is a big deal.

Re: Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal

#17
post #15

2026 is nearly upon us, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple remain steadfast in the refusal to ever allow anyone to share wide-gamut or HDR images. Every year, I go on a rant about how my camera can take HDR images natively, but the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube. It's absolutely bonkers to me that we've all collectiv…

> the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube i understand some of this frustration, but really you just have to use ffmpeg to convert it to a web format (which can be done by ffmpeg.js running in a service worker if your cpu is expensive) and spell > I can't politely express my disgust at the ineptitude, the sloth, the foo…

> Doesn't work for sharing images in text messages, social media posts, email, Teams, Wikipedia, etc...

> i can think of a few better uses for such a wand...

We all have our priorities.

Re: Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal

#18
post #4
post #2

The final piece of the JPEG XL puzzle!

It's a huge piece for sure, but not the only one. For example, Firefox and Windows both don't support it out of the box currently. Firefox requires nightly or an extension, and on Windows you need to download support from the Microsoft store.

> on Windows you need to download support from the Microsoft store.

To be really fair, on Windows:

- H.264 is the only guaranteed (modern-ish) video codec (HEVC, VP9, AV1 is not built-in unless the device manufacturer bothered to do it)

- JPEG, GIF, and PNG are the only guaranteed (widely-used) image codecs (HEIF, AVIF, and JXL is also not built-in)

- MP3 and AAC are the only guaranteed (modern-ish) audio codecs (Opus is another module)

... and all of them are widely used when Windows 7 was released (before the modern codecs) so probably modules are now the modern Windows Method™ for codecs.

Note on pre-8 HEVC support: the codec (when not on VLC or other software bundling their own codecs) is often on that CyberLink Bluray player, not a built-in one.

Re: Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal

#19

2026 is nearly upon us, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple remain steadfast in the refusal to ever allow anyone to share wide-gamut or HDR images. Every year, I go on a rant about how my camera can take HDR images natively, but the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube. It's absolutely bonkers to me that we've all collectiv…

I’m wondering if HDR means something different to me, because I see HDR images all the time. I can share HDR images via phones (this seems to be the default behavior on iPhone/Mac messages), I can see HDR PNG stills on the web (https://github.com/swankjesse/hdr-emojis), I can see wide gamut P3 images on the web as well (https://webkit.org/blog-files/color-gamut/).

What am I missing?

Re: Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal

#20
post #9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JPEG-XL is recommended as the preferred format for HDR content for PDFs, so it’s more likely to be encountered: https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/10/another_chance_for_jp...

What I mean to say is, I believe browsers do support JPEG 2000 in PDF, just not on the web.

the last time that I check it, I find that I need to convert to Jpeg to show the image in browsers.
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