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Comment by Liquix | Hacker News Reader

g**gle is hellbent on killing JPEG-XL support in favor of WebP. assuming they'll capitulate to downstream pressure is a stretch. this article [0] sums it up nicely:

What this [removal of support for JPEG-XL in Chromium] really translates to is, “We’ve created WebP, a competing standard, and want to kill anything that might genuinely compete with it”. This would also partly explain why they adopted AVIF but not JPEG XL. AVIF wasn’t superior in every way and, as such, didn’t threaten to dethrone WebP.

[0] https://vale.rocks/posts/jpeg-xl-and-googles-war-against-it

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I'm not assuming they capitulate under just pressure. Rather I'm assuming they'll capitulate if a majority of or even all of the big third party chromium browsers push for adding it to mainline chromium.

This is less just blind pressure but rather the risk that google becomes seen as an untrustworthy custodian of chromium and that downstreams start supporting an alternate upstream outside of google's control.

Jxl is certainly a hill that google seems intent to stand on but I doubt it's one they'd choose to die on. Doubly so given the ammo it'd give in the ongoing chrome anti-trust lawsuits.

How is Google so intent on webp winning? They don't even support it in their own products besides Chrome.

Chrome is like a different company. They do weird shit.

You either die an hero or live long enough to become the MS Office team.

But MS Office team is more easier to understand: they want money.

they don't in google chrome team???

Well not directly

Chrome is a "free funnel" into Google services, just like Android.

That 20B a year that Google pays to Apple, think of that but a bigger traffic stream. That is Chrome, so Chrome is worth MORE than 20B a year to Google.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147007/google-paid-apple...

The risks and downsides of exposing an image decoder to the entire web are very real, especially a relatively new/untested one written in a language like C++. There's been vulnerabilities in pretty much every other image decoder and I fully expect jpeg-xl to be no different. You can't just brush that aside. Hell, article doesn't even acknowledge it. Google has no real stake in webp vs. jpeg-xl either. You may disagree with the decision, this this kind of stuff doesn't make much sense.

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