Also, all those Chrome offshoots (Edge, Brave, Opera, etc) could easily add and enable it to distinguish themselves from Chrome ("faster page load", "less network use") and don't. Makes me wonder what's going on...
Chrome has a neat feature where some flags can be enabled by websites, so that websites can choose to cooperate in testing. They never did this for JXL, but if they re-added JXL behind a flag, they could do so but with such testing enabled. Then they could get real data from websites actually using it, without committing to supporting it if it isn't useful.
> Also, all those Chrome offshoots (Edge, Brave, Opera, etc) could easily add and enable it to distinguish themselves from Chrome ("faster page load", "less network use") and don't. Makes me wonder what's going on...
Edge doesn't use Chrome's own codec support. It uses Windows's media framework. JXL is being added to it next year.
Interesting!
And I suppose the Chrome folks have the telemetry to know how many people set that damn flag.
> “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
> “That’s the display department.”
> “With a flashlight.”
> “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
> “So had the stairs.”
> “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
> “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’”
But "implement something new!" is a very different demand from "you took that away from us, undo that!"
Is asking for the old thing to be re-added, but without the flag that sabotaged it. It is the same as "you took that away from us, undo that!" Removing a flag does not turn it into a magical, mystical new thing that has to be built from scratch. This is silly. The entire point of having flags is to provide a testing platform for code that may one day have the flag removed.
That said: these actual users didn't demonstrate any hacker spirit or interest in using JXL in situations where they could. Where's the wide-spread use of jxl.js (https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js) to demonstrate that there are actual users desperate for native codec support? (aside: jxl.js is based on Squoosh, which is a product of GoogleChromeLabs) If JXL is sooo important, surely people would use whatever workaround they can employ, no matter if that convinces the Chrome team or not, simply because they benefit from using it, no?
Instead all I see is people _not_ exercising their freedom and initiative to support that best-thing-since-slices-bread-apparently format but whining that Chrome is oh-so-dominant and forces their choices of codecs upon everybody else.
Okay then...
In the current scenario jpeg xl users are most likely to emerge outside of the web, in professional and prosumer photography, and then we will have — unnecessarily — two different format worlds. Jpeg xl for photography processing and a variety of web formats, each with their problems.
How is that relevant? Flags are to allow testing, not to gauge interest from regular users.