JPEG XL: How It Started, How It’s Going

A shortlist:

• it has the best lossy image compression (not counting extremely low bitrate images, where AVIF starts to win)
• it can losslessly recompress JPEGs for a free 20% space savings - no image quality loss
• it supports parallel decoding for extra speed
• it supports progressive decoding (viewing a lower quality version of the image while it loads), unlike WebP/AVIF which just "pop up" when you've downloaded the whole thing
• it supports lossless
• it compresses lossless extremely well (notably unlike AVIF and PNG which fall on their face with lossless compression)
• it supports animation (though AVIF is generally a better format for animation, because it's based on a proper video codec)
• it supports HDR
• it has a very strong resilience against generation loss (the classic "JPEG degradation" of resaving images)
• it is royalty-free
• it otherwise has roughly every image format feature we've ever thought of included in its spec

If JXL is not the next image format then we will never ever get rid of JPEG and PNG. There has never been a more obviously superior image format in history.

JPEG XL provides comparable image quality to ordinary JPEG compression at around 80% of the file size. It also supports lossless encoding at smaller sizes than PNG, and can handle layers, transparency and CMYK, so in principle it could conveniently replace almost every existing raster image format.

So I agree with your sentiment for the most part. Mainly, it’s frustrating to see all of these new image standards come out which somehow compete with each other due to lack of browser support.

That said 44k isn’t peanuts. That’s a huge reduction, especially on lower end connection speeds.

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The article discusses how it's better than webp. Specifically, it's much better at both compression ratios and performance, at all quality levels. WebP has problems where the compression falls off due to being locked to yuv420

It is when you’re a cloud hosting platform and you have 1000’s of photos uploaded daily. That 44k saving scales massively when talking about cloud hosting platforms. The jpeg xl format license is more open than webp which is controlled by google.

The new format also enables more features than just file size, a quick google shows it supports animation, 360 photos, and image bursts (as well as more technical specifics that allow for better share ability without needing to have an accompanying json file or dropping to RAW).

This is more important because it means websites can embed photos and the web engine whether it be chromium, Firefox, or safari can handle it natively without needing JavaScript or some other intermediary.

What about png? It’s just another competing standard. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter, but by not having competing standards we end up having one company controlling it. So since at the very least it gives a decent file size saving it’s good enough for me.

The compression is just that good, bro.

Which graph is that? I only see this one, which has all axes labeled.

I am not crazy it was posted 3 days ago with the same title. Why? https://lemm.ee/post/1629469

The TLDR summary is that AVIF was going to be the next generation standard for image formats but when JPEG-XL released with a near identical feature-set, better quality compression, and backwards compatibility with JPEG, the tech world put its support behind JPEG-XL.

Naturally, Google as one of AVIF’s creators was unhappy that the standard they control looks like it will lose the format war and so they decided to use their web monopoly to kill JPEG-XL in the cradle by killing support for it in Chrome around a few months ago.

While this has slowed JPEG-XL’s momentum by a lot, even the other co-creators of AVIF like Apple, Meta, and Microsoft are still putting their support behind JPEG-XL and it seems like they would rather force JPEG-XL adoption themselves than go back to AVIF.

Hardware support doesn't matter, if it's a small image why would you use your GPU to decode it?