Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

londons_explore

I support the Chrome team with this one...

Something like an image format should either be widely used (ie. At least 5% of websites use it), or it shouldn't exist.

A format existing has a maintenance cost, a security cost, an extra barrier to people designing new browser's or web technology, etc. If fewer than 5% of sites use it, and all features can be achieved another way, then it simply isn't worth keeping support.

Sorry JPEG XL... You were a nice design, but ultimately you weren't popular enough. A bit like Server Push (web server can send your client data you'll need ahead of time saving a round trip), ScriptProcessorNode (JavaScript can mix/make audio realtime) and DANE (security with no certificate authority)... All cool tech that didn't manage to find a userbase.

A format cannot and will not get adoption until there is support. Who would sign off on using JXL when any of the large browsers don't support it?

This is a chicken-egg problem, not a popularity contest.

>Something like an image format should either be widely used (ie. At least 5% of websites use it), or it shouldn't exist.

>I support the Chrome team with this one...

WebP ......

WebP actually is pretty widely used... I suspect over half of browsing sessions load at least one WebP image.

And was WebP widely used before Chrome enabled support for it?

WebP was supported in Chrome about a decade before it became widely used. It was even already supported before the format was even finalized: lossless and animation were added after the first (lossy-still-only) WebP support was enabled in Chrome.

Yes sorry jonsneyers. I was just trying to point out the obvious.

How exactly are you supposed to use a format that isn't supported?

How would 5% of sites ever get to use JXL if it isn't supported in web browsers?

By implementing the decoder in WebAssembly. It'd be lower performance than native decoding but probably not that bad.

Here's one: https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js

Demo: https://niutech.github.io/jxl.js/

Libjxl's own WASM build: https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/tree/main/tools/wasm_demo

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