Does anyone have a quick summary what this is all about?
Google owns the license to another proprietary image format for large raster images (WEBP).
Google used to support JPEG XL in chromium, but dropped support for it. Many people believe this is specifically to manipulate a market advantage for WEBP.
Chrome never properly supported JPEG XL; it was hidden behind a feature flag, which of course almost no one enables. Their concerns are also valid: "we don't want to expose users to security-sensitive code without significant benefit for the users". Supporting as few as possible image formats is essentially a good thing for everyone; see e.g. https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=libpng
Google has banked on AVIF, which has quite a bit more traction. I do think that JPEG XL would be a good addition, but I also think it's reasonable to have a different opinion on that.
Everything about this post is wrong. The "many people who believe" this are engaging in nonsensical conspiratorial thinking without any evidence, which is pretty much what I've come to expect on HN about anything Google-related.
This is a nonsense statement of opinion.
AVIF is severely more computationally expensive than JPEG XL (over 100 times worse at high bitrates), limited to 4k resolution, has worse compression, and is missing desirable features like progressive decoding and lossless recompression.
> There is just no incentive for Google to push for WebP: they have nothing to gain by it.
They have complete control over the standard. No one else can make changes to it without their approval. JPEG XL is governed by ISO.
It's possible to sandbox these things. Firefox sandboxes some native libs, by compiling to WebAssembly, then back to C.
Lots of things are possible in principle; it's also possible to write rs-libjxl which would significantly reduce the problem. But there's a difference between "what's possible" and "what the reality is today", and in the context of what the situation is today it seems to me the concerns are valid.
No, they had an experimental implementation, behind a flag. No stable version of Chromium has ever supported JPEG XL.
(The claimed reasons for the removal: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805.... This is the last comment by an @chromium.org account.)
- Experimental flags and code should not remain indefinitely
- There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL
- The new image format does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats to warrant enabling it by default
- By removing the flag and the code in M110, it reduces the maintenance burden and allows us to focus on improving existing formats in Chrome
Yes. webp was finalized years ago and webp2 was cancelled in favor of everyone working together on AV1/AVIF.