Given these positive signals
Those idiots waited for 4 years because they followed the hype of the moment. I’m glad I removed Google from my life.
Given these positive signals, we would welcome contributions
Poor Google doesn’t have the manpower to implement it. They can only accept contributions from volunteers.
“we would welcome contributions to integrate a performant and memory-safe JPEG XL decoder in Chromium. In order to enable it by default in Chromium we would need a commitment to long-term maintenance.”
yeah
The name of the format makes me think it’s regular jpeg, but bigger. Wouldn’t it be better to be smaller? 🤔
No. They increased the max “canvas” size and increased encoding efficiency. You’d want the file size to be smaller but the file itself to be larger (and consequently more detailed)
I just use old JPEGs. Not JPEG2000, not PNG, not WebP, not JPEG XL.
Feel free to use floppy disks. Btw if you are online, you use WebP and PNG all the time 🤣
If you are using Firefox:
- Enter the following in the address bar: about:config
- Search for: image.webp.enabled
- Set it to false Websites are delivering JPG/PNG instead of WebP again.
Why though
Because I’m tired of all this nonsense where just because a thing is a mature technology, it’s considered obsolete. Stop constantly pushing for the next thing. Keep the things that work.
Webp is a smaller file size than jpeg for the same image quality in almost all circumstances - so it’s more efficient and quicker to load. It also supports lossless compression, transparency, and animation, none of which jpeg do. And the jpeg gets noticable visual artefacts at a much higher quality than webp does.
People didn’t adopt it to annoy you. It’s started to replace jpeg for the same reason jpeg started to replace bmp - it’s a better, more efficient format.
Webp is a smaller file size than jpeg for the same image quality in almost all circumstances
For lower quality images sure, for high quality ones JPEG will beat it (WebP, being an old video format, only supports a quarter of the colour resolution than JPEG does, etc.) JPEG is actually so good that it still comes out ahead in a bunch of benchmarks, it’s just it’s now starting to show it’s age technology wise (like WebP, it’s limited to 8bpc in most cases)
It also doesn’t hurt that Google ranked sites using WebP/AVIF higher than ones that aren’t (via lighthouse).
Edit: I should clarify, this is the lossy mode. The lossless mode gives better compression than PNG, but is still limited to 8bpc, so can’t store high bit depth, or HDR images, like PNG can.
Edit 2: s/bpp/bpc/
I would be more excited about JPEG XL if it was backward compatible. Not looking forward to yet another image standard that requires OS and hardware upgrades simply so servers can save a few bytes.
How would a new format be backwards-compatible? At least JPEG-XL can losslessly compress standard jpg for a bit of space savings, and servers can choose to deliver the decompressed jpg to clients that don’t support JPEG-XL.
Also from Wikipedia:
Computationally efficient encoding and decoding without requiring specialized hardware: JPEG XL is about as fast to encode and decode as old JPEG using libjpeg-turbo
Being a JPEG superset, JXL provides efficient lossless recompression options for images in the traditional/legacy JPEG format that can represent JPEG data in a more space-efficient way (~20% size reduction due to the better entropy coder) and can easily be reversed, e.g. on the fly. Wrapped inside a JPEG XL file/stream, it can be combined with additional elements, e.g. an alpha channel.
