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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

> It is a fact that the release cycle of browsers is more suitable for innovation than that of most other software,

Also there is a huge financial incentive for large web hosting companies (e.g. Google, Facebook) to adopt compression formats that save bandwidth, using automated tools to apply those wherever possible.

People making e.g. image archives or building image capture hardware are going to be slower. They don’t want to use new untested technologies that might not succeed, and they don’t want to switch more frequently than necessary. When they do transition it will be by applying new technologies to new images but not immediately transforming older images to use the new technology.

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True — which is one of the reasons why JPEG XL includes a risk-free JPEG recompression option: if needed, you can just undo it and get the bit-exact same JPEG files back.

Applying lossy recompression on already-lossy-compressed images is something you should avoid at all cost, since it inevitably causes generation loss (and it is also likely to not be very effective, since you're basically spending a lot of bits in the new codec on replicating compression artifacts of the old codec).

Happy users, faster growing userbase, more e-store revenue, higher click-through rates, lower latency, better quality-of-experience, or more 7-day-returning users can be more important financial incentives than bandwidth. Humans are more than thousands of times more valuable than a computer.

When image quality and observed latency are at a level where users don't care even subconsciously (say, images look like camera originals and load in 100 ms), then bandwidth cost optimization may become a good 2nd objective.

This is a strange argument. The larger companies have plenty of people to work on all the things you mentioned plus bandwidth optimizations. Also, they’re rarely the same people.

The claim (from one of the people working on JPEG XL at Google) is that better image compression is going to reduce latency (or allow higher-quality images) and thereby improve other metrics besides bandwidth costs, giving internet companies even more incentive to adopt better codecs.

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