And soon Firefox will include it in Stable. During October it will go from Safari only to majority coverage. Eventful month!
While AVIF may have a slight edge in some cases like in fairly lossy compression, you won't really go _wrong_ with JPEG XL (unless strongly CPU constrained) and I think the strength of the format is its extreme versatility as a "be all end all image format" for some time where comparative performance depending on functionality ranges from respectable to excellent. It can work as a replacement for AVIF, PNG, JPEG, WebP, even certain TIFF required scenarios (high bit depth, multichannel, layers) depending on use cases.
Rollout looks solid, but I'll probably avoid deploying it to anything live til early next year at the minimum. That'll give time for browser adoption to happen.
Biggest concern I have was the same I had with AVIF a couple years ago, which is hardware acceleration on the server side. I attempted to roll out AVIF only to find out the encoding time was so long that sync calls were timing out due to queuing. It's gotten a lot better, but just know that all of these newer formats really do need more compute. It may not be worth the cost tradeoff vs webp until encoders are baked into chips.
I don't see any advantage of any of the new formats over the good old and proven formats, so I stick with PNG and JPEG (properly optimized.) I can fire up any old browser and it will just work.
JPEGXL literally is able to display images and colors that jpeg and png cannot (32-but floating point, layers, emission independent transparency, spot colors, built im depth maps). It’s not just about compression optimization. So for those use cases standard JPEG and PNG alone will never work. There are “updated” versions of JPEG that support some of these like HDR but those won’t work with any old browser either so back to the same issue.
I'm not sure if the parent comment means to say, but I could choose to interpret their meaning to be:
PNG/JPEG have strong support (nearly everywhere). I think of them almost as the modern TIFF - relatively simple, and almost everything supports one or both of them (few to no issues).
JXL may eventually get there (that indeed seems to be its goal), but for now I wouldn't drop e.g. PNG or JPEG support in favor of JXL now.
And arguably, perhaps never drop support; its such a prevalent format, even if all software (prevalent or otherwise) supports the format in 10 years, there will be such a huge stockpile of JPEG/PNG that something will need to be used to read/convert.
It's exciting to see JXL support being re-added in Chrome after being removed a while ago and them seemingly not being interested in supporting it [1].
I think JXL is a cool image format, but was being held back by the most popular browser not supporting it, limiting its use (in the web especially) by a lot.
Somebody could think of the web as primarily a platform for consumption, in which case it is OK for it to support a limited number of formats, actually desirable because it reduces the attack area.
Another is that the web is connected to general purpose computing in which that case the web browser competes with GUI shells (e.g. explorer, finder) and should be able to support every image format that is commonly used on the platform.
Back in the 1990s most platform supported a lot of file formats that weren't JPEG or GIF but browsers didn't support them and only a small set of formats have been added since then.
A long time ago I ran some sites that hosted large image collections and I struggled with costs so I did a lot of thinking about how to optimize storage and transfer. I came to the conclusion about 5 years ago that WebP is consistently a win over Jpeg, but I've never been a fan of AVIF. Yeah, it does great for big blog hero images that people don't look at closely, but it makes my mirrorless shots look like they were shot on a cheap Android. Yeah, I've seen that picture of the F1 car and it is superficially impressive but if you look closely at the highlights you can see that it erased the real highlights and replaced them with something plausible but... different.
I'm on the other side, I hate webp because if I download such an image a lot of apps don't support it. So typically I need to screenshot it instead to get a usable jpg/png.
Now one more format to hate.
I would say webp/jxl/avif is anti-general compute, since they require very recent software.
Some people get mad at this reason for hating WebP, but it's so true. The main way in which most people's lives are affected by WebP is that images they download from the web no longer work.
Thanks for pointing that out. The stated reasoning for not supporting JXL is understandable, though quite vague. It feels like the sort of general trade-offs you could cite about not supporting any codec. In my experience in large companies, such 'tough choices' on features that would be "nice to have, but doesn't make the priority cut" are usually driven by demand from internal stakeholders or corp strategy not exceeding budget/head count constraints.
While I'm happy for the reversal, it would be helpful to have a corresponding explanation addressing what changed leading to this reversal just two years later (assuming the decision to support was made 9-12 mos ago). Since significant decisions are usually harder to make in big companies (due to many competing prioritities, stakeholders, and processes), they tend to also be harder to reverse (especially in just two years, when most of original deciders are still in the same roles). I suspect the real thing that changed is more interesting than "the technology or people changed" or "our prior assessment was wrong".
I'm sure those implementers got their fair share of the Google profit or at least a nominal donation for doing most of the work of building out a feature enhancement
My favourite tidbit about the Amiga is that it was the first platform that got PNG support in all its web browsers: you just had to install the png.datatype.
AmigaOS was the first to bring a lot of smart ideas to a consumer platform.
I got my A1000 in late '85 and only had prior exposure to 8-bit home computers (C64, Atari, etc), CP/M and DOS (no mainframes, minis or workstations). I didn't actually use Macs or early Windows until the early 90s and it was shocking how backward they still seemed in some ways. I'd sort of the assumed the other major platforms were making similar advancements throughout the late 80s.
Eh. WebKit, Blink, Gecko being the big ones, supporting Windows, Linux (and alikes — maybe one would consider Android separate in this context) and Darwin (in this context iOS/macOS is the same). Mostly 1:1.
The thing is that it's still just a library, it just happened to be pre-installed. CGImage is just a helper in the Core Graphics library, not some magical "native"/"core" functionality in the OS that would be different than any other library with the same features.
An equivalent library for Linux (glycin for example), or per-format libraries like jxl-rs, are not "included in the OS", and tend to be the very same libraries one would use for Windows. If that does the trick on most platforms, then why have the maintenance burden of doing something different on macOS if all it does is save a few bytes on disk?
From Google's perspective, they would likely not want Chrome for macOS to gain support for jxl as the sole platform anyway, even if they are using CGImage and could decode it that way...
I'd definitely consider Android separate from Linux, yes. Their multimedia subsystems are completely different. The same applies to tons of embedded Linux platforms running an embedded Chromium or WebKit.
Browsers have also largely switched to handling most aspects of TLS and certificates themselves, despite there being OS libraries for those as well; the same applies to HTTP.
Yeah, and then 100 different apps can repackage the browser engine as an Electron app, each weigh 300+mb.
I saw this recently with Balena etcher. It's a firmware flashing app with about 10 buttons total. It's over 400mb because it's written in node and has an electron GUI.
pv has a progress bar and nicer syntax. Next time you need to write an image, try:
sudo pv -Yo /dev/blah /path/to/your/image.img
The -Y makes it sync after each write so that the progress bar represents actual progress instead of just how fast you can copy to kernel write buffers.
My life improved measurably after I contributed that '-o' flag to pv and it then made its way into all my systems through regular OS updates :)
Long live dd! Except every time I use it I am terrified I'll blow out the brains of the wrong device :/
Another example clown app: the MacOS downloads of TuxGuitar, a Java app, used to just ship as a zip with a big jar in it. Now it ships an entire Java Runtime environment specific to your processor architecture. It's 480MB. Derp.
Such an important piece of software does not want to subject itself to the packaging and support woes of shared libraries. There are security issues, maintainability issues, and much more headache by going with that approach.
Static linking is one and done, headache gone. People have large drives these days, so it's not a problem.
There are areas where the browser will dynamically link, but those are more OS-related than image and file format codecs.
There were obviously some internal politics going on—Google joined the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium of the who's who of the media/tech industry: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Nvidia… the list goes on. They supported AVIF as the next generation image format.
Google apparently wanted to be one of the "cool kids" supporting AVIF. When they removed the JPEG XL code from Chrome, they created the excuse that there was little demand for it, along with some other disingenuous talking points that didn't quite make sense. Ironically the project that ended up becoming JPEG XL was started by Google employees in Switzerland.
Anyway, I’m glad Google is supporting JPEG XL now. I wanted to use JPEG XL files for a project I started a month ago, but it was a non-starter with global usage under 20% at the time.
Removed because having yet another giant C codec was a huge risk, re-added because the PDF Association chose JXL as their next image format so anyone rendering PDFs (including browsers) is now required to have it.
"Required" is a strong word. More than enough people use Chrome as a PDF viewer that if Google decided to not support JXL, you'd see ~0 PDFs with it.
Another giant codec is only a huge risk if you run the decoder in the renderer process, which they say in the linked thread they do, but I don't see a sane reason why.
I'm sure if they asked the secret Gemini 4.0 AGI to use their existing very good sandbox to throw all the decoders in their own process and only share the image buffers, it could do it in a few hours.
Glad to see it happen. I'd prefer it there was just one format rather than both jxl and avif, but at least it's the final nail in the coffin of webp which seems to have accomplished little but annoy people for not much gain.
The wider ecosystem support is still far from commonplace, but it is slowly changing. iOS 18 wouldn't work with .jxl in Photos, but 27 does. Similarly, quick look and preview works fine on MacOS 27, thumbnails show up properly etc. I also found no issues with .jxl on linux, and image editors are slowly adding support as well.
Plain old jpg will still be everywhere for the next decade, but I'm glad that we finally have superior options with no real downsides, and without all the patent bullshit to boot.
Well while you're here, there definitely are some issues with animated image support. Just earlier this week I attempted to use an animated .avif as my avatar image. It uploaded fine, the preview showed it fine, but the actual applied image was static again. Not sure if there's some issues with in the pipeline to handle those.
Surely support is even worse for both .jxl and .avif? If the annoying thing about .webp was lack of support, I don't think .jxl nor .avif solve any of that - just the opposite.
One thing to note is that even when WebP did eventually get support in many places, it often look a very long time because there just wasn’t that much motive or interest to support it. So for years it was the weird format you’d accidentally download from the web and have little luck getting to work off-line.
The non-exhaustive table linked below shows how long it took for different programs to support different image formats since their introduction. Outside of Chrome, Chrome in disguise, and whatever has become of Firefox, adoption of JPEG XL has been far more enthusiastic than it ever has for WebP—or AVIF, for that matter. So we are very unlikely to have a long period when JPEG XL only works on the web and nowhere else.
Right, due to slim support outside of browsers, webp files kinda turned into lumps of coal when downloaded, going from the image you wanted to a chunk of data that nothing but the browser knew what to do with. It was like the file format version of those fake-transparent PNGs with checkerboard background.
Every time a new image format comes out, I think about the compatibility crisis between apps.
E.g. Telegram still doesn't have sane support for .webp, it treats them as stickers. MacOS can take a long time to update with support for new formats. Image viewer apps even longer, many never updating to support new formats.
JPEG-XL is not particularly patent-laden and its license is correct for the use-case.
Other than the complexity of its implementation, there is very-little-to-no business nor technical reason not to use it or include it.
It has every right to be "the" image format for the next 20-odd years. Excellent compression, excellent lossless mode, transparency, etc. etc.
And probably my favorite feature- progressive rendering, which means you never have to make thumbnails ever again, you just truncate the output stream at the right proportion of pixel data (!)
iOS also now supports it natively for the photos it takes... but only if you have a newer iPhone than mine (a 15 Pro Max).
That doesn’t seem related to the codec itself but rather how you fetch said image.
Worst case scenario you should be able to add some smarts to the server and a query string such that the client can request 5% of the file or whatever simply by fiddling with the url.
> Apple refused to support it because they wanted to patent-laden alternative to thrive.
Where do people get this stuff?
Apple finally supported WebP in 2020, 10 years after it was released by Google. Firefox added WebP support in 2019, a year before Safari. Was Mozilla also part of conspiracy to undermine WebP? Come on now.
Seems to me neither Apple or Mozilla wanted to be forced to support a format they had no say in developing. Usually there's a process for coming to consensus on standards.
WebP is ubiquitous now, not the case in 2010 when it was released.
It had advantages compared to JPEG, but not enough at the time to justify changing workflows, etc. WebP initially had better compression than JPEG, but as encoders/decoders improved (MozJPEG, Jpegli, turbo-libjpeg, Guetzli) the lead WebP had mostly went away regarding compression and visual fidelity.
Going forward, WebP is becoming less relevant by the day; it doesn't support wide gamut color; it only supports RGB. It's max pixel count is quite limited compared to AVIF and JPEG XL. Newer formats have use cases beyond the web; WebP doesn't.
> MacOS can take a long time to update with support for new formats.
Apple added JPEG XL support for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS in September 2023 [1]; iPhone 17 Pro/Pro Max added support for JPEG XL Lossy and Lossless compression for ProRAW pictures last year [2].
When Apple adopts jxl-rs, Safari, Chrome and Firefox will use the same JPEG XL decoder.
True, but in my opinion JPEG XL has the right balance of features to become a true replacement of almost every relevant image format we use today, on the web and elsewhere.
Nothing is perfect and niche formats will always be necessary but I think JPEG XL has a good chance to become the USB of image formats.
Depends on who you listen to, or what you test it on. It goes either way, and avif is typically significantly better at small files sizes where loading speed (or saving data) is the priority.
It's too bad that the concept of having a system-wide plugin architecture for importing/exporting formats never caught on outside a few niche platforms. AmigaOS had DataTypes back in the '80s, and BeOS had Translators back in the '90s.
The Linux/FOSS world kind of approximates this just because applications are often built against the same underlying libraries and utilities, e.g ImageMagick or FFMpeg, rather than implementing their own import/export filters, but it'd be nice to be able to install a single system-wide datatype library for a specific format, and have all of my existing software instantly be able to read and write it.
WIC is reasonably widely used since it's used by WPF to load images. The problem is that a plugin codec structure exposes you to bad codecs. We had a tool at work break because someone installed a fast image viewer that overrode the default WIC JPEG decoder with a faster one that crashed loading our tool's splash screen image.
Codecs have been a thing on both major OSes, Windows Media Player could open DivX and QuickTime could open MKV. I think they were only limited to videos however.
I think QuickTime 7 had that capability (I remember installing a codec to make it play wmv video) but Apple removed the plugin architecture in QuickTime X.
The tortoises have somehow outrun the hare because Safari still hasn't turned on progressive loading in libjxl (which had this feature since before Safari added the feature), while FF (non Android) and Chrome shipped with it enabled. The 3 year long chess clock is now flipped.
You can’t really do that with PNG today either, because of all the PNG optimizers that quantize images before encoding them to PNG for better compression.
That's true of WebP and AVIF as well. I think all modern image codecs have both lossy and lossless modes - the separation between JPEG for lossy and PNG for lossless seems to be a historical oddity.
This is something that can be addressed by file managers - showing a metadata entry on whether it's lossy or lossless. File extension (along with the bifurcated mainstream adoption of JPEG and PNG) has been a great proxy to do this, but like others noted, can be deceptive, which is arguably worse.
You cannot tell it just from the extension either. If you like extensions, you can use a '.lossless.jxl'. And in general for most formats, you can use metadata to store that info (also doesn't guarantee anything)
This is indeed frustrating, though realistically not that big of a deal for most users, especially if you consider lossless as just highest quality. Though personally I think it makes sense to have different extensions by convention for lossless and animated images.
JPEG artifacts are literally a meme, normal people are aware of this stuff.
I hold the extremist view that had we decided to use .png for lossless webps, it would have been an overall net gain - in people's minds "png" maps roughly to "whoever last touched this image didn't do anything evil to it" - very few people care how the data is actually encoded.
I've been wishing for years that all of these codecs with hybrid lossless/lossy modes would just add a single l to their file extensions, purely for the annoyance of it.
Like, you can do this individually, but it's not the same thing as actually having it in the standard.
See I would think lossless is the one you have to specify. (Also, it stops being "large" when you extend this gripe to similar formats like AVIF and WebP.)
Nice. I added support for JXL to a low traffic chan board after Firefox added experimental support. I would honestly be surprised if anyone ever upload anything in that format but I can see some use cases for it after reading this thread. I am curious if some day JXL would ever be as popular as JPG or PNG and what would drive that change. Art sites perhaps? Maybe DeviantArt could add support for it.
Art sites get the biggest gain with JXL. They can losslessly repackage every single JPEG uploads they have for practically zero cost. Existing PNG can also be losslessly compressed to JXL too, and just wrapping JXL around PNG yields improved compression (Note for last part: it is still in proposal status)
Drat! I hoped this was going to cover the internal battle where Google executives trying to stop JPEG XL and how engineers finally convinced them to change their minds.
My guess: the engineers didn’t win the argument. The executives just gave up once all the other browsers had added support.
> The executives just gave up once all the other browsers had added support.
The big turning point seemed to have been Adobe adopting JpegXL as an approved image compression algorithm for the upcoming PDF spec. update. With that, since all browsers seem to also want to be PDF renderers, meant they had no choice but to include a JpegXL decoder. The win, if there was one here, was that the decoder they have to ship anyway now was exposed for use by <img> tags as well as by the PDF renderer.
It's interesting how different theories come about when there is a lack of information and a high degree of preexisting bias. Reality is a lot simpler - it wasn't deemed worth the cost of addressing the security problems in the existing library so someone chose to abandon the format. However as industry adoption increased and a newer safe library appeared, the decision was changed. Also, note that while Google developed the new rust library, it wasn't the chrome team who made the investment.
> Reality is a lot simpler - it wasn't deemed worth the cost of addressing the security problems in the existing library so someone chose to abandon the format.
As evidenced by what? When first rejecting JPEG XL, Google did share their reasoning, but security problems hardly figured in it.
JPEG XL is largely a Google effort including in creating the specification, the reference implementation and later a safer Rust implementation. Why would Google executives want to stop it? From what I gather it's Chrome engineers that didn't want it because it was huge, had little adoption (at the time), and was rather redundant with AVIF and WebP (for Web purposes). Not saying they didn't have related mandates from executives but they also have a lot of say in what goes in and what doesn't.
My guess is that Apple supporting it natively in iOS (there's an option in iPhone 16+ to save taken photos as JPEG-XL instead of Apple's proprietary format) likely also pushed the needle
I think it might have something to do with a Rust based decoder becoming available. IIRC one of the reasons for not implementing it before was expanding the attack surface.
They added enough fear/uncertainty/doubt around jpeg xl that no sane organization will adopt it now. God Google might decide to remove support again in 2027
WebP is 15 years old, and Google cares about it less than anybody else. Pretty much everybody else supports WebP but Google can’t even be bothered adding support for it to Google Docs.
I love the codec and am glad to see it supported again. They overcame the security issues using a rust SIMD port. I wonder what "approximately as fast as the best non-memory-safe alternative" means - the wording suggests they didn't beat the C++ implementation, but how close is it?
Here's a benchmark over time of jxl-rs (Rust) vs libjxl (C++) across both memory usage and performance: https://jxl-rs-perf.lucaversari.it/. I'm inclined to trust that it's a decent benchmark since it's from Luca Versari, a key person in the original JPEG XL standardization effort and development of libjxl, and is now the main developer of jxl-rs.
Seems to be between a little and a lot faster in almost all of the tests.
I have a feeling that progressive loaders got downgraded along the way for whatever reason. I remember seeing progressive JPEGs and PNGs also load... progressively. JPEG even often had a grayscale-like first layer.
Taking photos in JPEG XL? That's what I meant; the consumer side is nice, but if everybody keeps taking AVIF, HEIC, and JPEGs, we're missing an important part. (Sure, smaller websites are nice too, but I can have that today with WebP, as CDNs need to serve multiple formats anyway.)
Took them long enough with a few embarassing detours, but a welcome news nonetheless! Has anyone ~blogged about some of the internal dynamics that lead the G ship to course-correct, would be curious to read?
Are they switching it on in Android Chrome? That would complete the picture of at least baseline support... eventually... when a decent percentage of Android phones actually get that version.
But Safari (MacOS or iOS) still doesn't support the progressive rendering shown here, nor animation, if caniuse is up to date:
Fun fact, I needed JPEG XL support for my C++ pipeline and I didn't feel like including any official libraries. Roughly $500 tokens later I had a fully working optimized JPEG XL spec compliant en/de/coder that outperformed the official codepaths (both cpp and rust) by 70% (lower runtime). Took literally 5 hours to build out. Can someone tell me what Google is doing?
About three years ago I had to find a replacement for old .jpg files and .png files.
The main two contenders were .avif and .webp. For a few reasons, I selected .avif and in hindsight I think it was the better, choice. Both would be objectively better than jpg or png.
With JPEG XL ... hmmm. AVIF is not perfect, in particular when the compression rate is very high I noticed that some photos lose a lot of intrinsic quality that is not instantly obvious; I noticed this when I took various pictures over the years from outdoors. Still, AVIF beats jpg and png just about on every metric when compression is required. With JPEG XL I guess I have to re-evaluate, but right now I am still sticking to avif. The two factors that will be important for me is compression ratio and quality. I am ok with a bit of loss of quality, if the compression is better, but I am not sure JPEG XL beats AVIF here clearly either, so I am not sure what to do with JPEG XL.
Both JPEG XL and WebP far exceed AVIF when it comes to lossless. For lossy, AVIF used to do better at low quality and JPEG XL at high quality. But apparently AV1 encoders have improved a lot since then, closing the distance. An article comparing the two was posted recently:
The author, who has worked on said AV1 encoders, has expressed doubt that JPEG XL encoders could improve much with only reasonable amounts of effort, but that was also only their personal (if educated) guess. With JPEG XL finally seeing adoption on the web, we will hopefully see work on the reference encoder resume in earnest soon.
So for now, I’d say you’re fine with AVIF. Unless you’re doing lossless, because AVIF sucks at lossless. (And JPEG XL has the unique feature of supporting lossless JPEG transcoding, too.)
I thing the endgame is lossless PNG with 16bit color components with basic compression like gzip or at best bzip2. Or a format without the weirdness of PNG 'line based loading' which is obsolete nowdays. The "expensive part", apart from the compression algorithm, being the meta data storage without kludge.
>without the weirdness of PNG 'line based loading' which is obsolete nowdays
How? Line-based loading is a very simple way to exploit 2D spatial coherence. A 1D format like gzip loses this advantage for minimal gain in simplicity.
These days I favour lossless WEBP instead of PNG. I often save around 30%~40% of file size compared to PNG, especially when the PNG is encoded with lots of bits per pixel (i.e 48 bits or 24 bits).
Oh hell no. HDR is already bad enough in Youtube on iOS where there seems to be no way to turn it off - you tune your brightness to something decent in bed... and then some video by some showoff dingus scrolls across the feed frying your eyeballs.
Fuck HDR or at the very least give people an option to turn it off!
Mobile Firefox let's me add Stylus and I assume other extensions like whatever the modern Greasemonkey is. So at least one of the good mobile browsers does support it.
If you're using a mobile browser without extension support, you should tell the devs of it to work on that.
I will say windows implementation of HDR - at least the way Chrome handles it within Windows is somewhat of an abomination - so I'm sure Apple's iOS is just as poor!
but sometimes it's not HDRs fault - it's just the segura effect. People with cameras exceeding their capability levels, not understanding what you need to do after you shoot video in LOG.
I mix multi-monitor some-HDR some-SDR in Windows, it's bad.
I do not know if JPEG XL is competitive with AVIF for very compressed images, because that is mostly a concern for those who want to host at a minimum cost Web pages with embedded images. I assume that AVIF must be better for that purpose.
On the other hand, AVIF cannot compete with JPEG XL for high-quality photographs, which is something much more important for me, because it is a format suitable for storing my own photographs and it is a format that would make me appreciate positively a Web site that would have beautiful images in this format.
That isn’t my experience. I tried compressing conference proceedings into thumbnails with tiny file size and for this purpose I found that JPEGXL is far better than AVIF
And soon Firefox will include it in Stable. During October it will go from Safari only to majority coverage. Eventful month!
While AVIF may have a slight edge in some cases like in fairly lossy compression, you won't really go _wrong_ with JPEG XL (unless strongly CPU constrained) and I think the strength of the format is its extreme versatility as a "be all end all image format" for some time where comparative performance depending on functionality ranges from respectable to excellent. It can work as a replacement for AVIF, PNG, JPEG, WebP, even certain TIFF required scenarios (high bit depth, multichannel, layers) depending on use cases.
Rollout looks solid, but I'll probably avoid deploying it to anything live til early next year at the minimum. That'll give time for browser adoption to happen.
Biggest concern I have was the same I had with AVIF a couple years ago, which is hardware acceleration on the server side. I attempted to roll out AVIF only to find out the encoding time was so long that sync calls were timing out due to queuing. It's gotten a lot better, but just know that all of these newer formats really do need more compute. It may not be worth the cost tradeoff vs webp until encoders are baked into chips.
I don't see any advantage of any of the new formats over the good old and proven formats, so I stick with PNG and JPEG (properly optimized.) I can fire up any old browser and it will just work.
JPEGXL literally is able to display images and colors that jpeg and png cannot (32-but floating point, layers, emission independent transparency, spot colors, built im depth maps). It’s not just about compression optimization. So for those use cases standard JPEG and PNG alone will never work. There are “updated” versions of JPEG that support some of these like HDR but those won’t work with any old browser either so back to the same issue.
JXL has clear advantages and saying you don't see them means you either didn't attempt to see them or willfully ignore them
I'm not sure if the parent comment means to say, but I could choose to interpret their meaning to be:
PNG/JPEG have strong support (nearly everywhere). I think of them almost as the modern TIFF - relatively simple, and almost everything supports one or both of them (few to no issues).
JXL may eventually get there (that indeed seems to be its goal), but for now I wouldn't drop e.g. PNG or JPEG support in favor of JXL now.
And arguably, perhaps never drop support; its such a prevalent format, even if all software (prevalent or otherwise) supports the format in 10 years, there will be such a huge stockpile of JPEG/PNG that something will need to be used to read/convert.
> I think of them almost as the modern TIFF - relatively simple
TIFF is not simple at all. There is a joke that it stands for “Thousands of Incompatible File Formats”.
JXL supports extra channels for multispectral images.
You should add that line to your resume.
I’d hire him.
Seems Firefox will get support in version 158
https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/3YM...
Being an “everything” image format sounds awful and something that’s over engineered and no person understands it.
It's exciting to see JXL support being re-added in Chrome after being removed a while ago and them seemingly not being interested in supporting it [1].
I think JXL is a cool image format, but was being held back by the most popular browser not supporting it, limiting its use (in the web especially) by a lot.
[1]: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40270698
Yes I think the major story here is Google removing and then re-adding it back. Big companies have big egos, so this is quite a miracle.
I have a feeling now JXL is here to stay, finally.
Hurrah!
Wasn't it due to poor security? libjxl had notorious bugs that would've on par with webp exploit, if present in browser:
https://security.snyk.io/vuln/?search=libjxl
I remember Project Zero cautioning Google's browser team against adding insecure decoders/encoders.
No, that was not part of the reason the Google Chrome team gave: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/WjCKc...
There are very interesting values here.
Somebody could think of the web as primarily a platform for consumption, in which case it is OK for it to support a limited number of formats, actually desirable because it reduces the attack area.
Another is that the web is connected to general purpose computing in which that case the web browser competes with GUI shells (e.g. explorer, finder) and should be able to support every image format that is commonly used on the platform.
Back in the 1990s most platform supported a lot of file formats that weren't JPEG or GIF but browsers didn't support them and only a small set of formats have been added since then.
A long time ago I ran some sites that hosted large image collections and I struggled with costs so I did a lot of thinking about how to optimize storage and transfer. I came to the conclusion about 5 years ago that WebP is consistently a win over Jpeg, but I've never been a fan of AVIF. Yeah, it does great for big blog hero images that people don't look at closely, but it makes my mirrorless shots look like they were shot on a cheap Android. Yeah, I've seen that picture of the F1 car and it is superficially impressive but if you look closely at the highlights you can see that it erased the real highlights and replaced them with something plausible but... different.
We had plug-ins to support them all.
And that was a pretty bad solution. Nobody wants to see "this web page doesn't display correctly because you're missing the bla bla plug-in".
Interesting.
I'm on the other side, I hate webp because if I download such an image a lot of apps don't support it. So typically I need to screenshot it instead to get a usable jpg/png.
Now one more format to hate.
I would say webp/jxl/avif is anti-general compute, since they require very recent software.
Some people get mad at this reason for hating WebP, but it's so true. The main way in which most people's lives are affected by WebP is that images they download from the web no longer work.
that's what firefox said, not chrome
Probably why Google implemented their own decoder in Rust
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/jpeg-xl-in-chrome#safety_f...
Thanks for pointing that out. The stated reasoning for not supporting JXL is understandable, though quite vague. It feels like the sort of general trade-offs you could cite about not supporting any codec. In my experience in large companies, such 'tough choices' on features that would be "nice to have, but doesn't make the priority cut" are usually driven by demand from internal stakeholders or corp strategy not exceeding budget/head count constraints.
While I'm happy for the reversal, it would be helpful to have a corresponding explanation addressing what changed leading to this reversal just two years later (assuming the decision to support was made 9-12 mos ago). Since significant decisions are usually harder to make in big companies (due to many competing prioritities, stakeholders, and processes), they tend to also be harder to reverse (especially in just two years, when most of original deciders are still in the same roles). I suspect the real thing that changed is more interesting than "the technology or people changed" or "our prior assessment was wrong".
“Their own” is a bit misleading. It’s largely a subset of the people who implemented libjxl in the first place, but this time in Rust.
I'm sure those implementers got their fair share of the Google profit or at least a nominal donation for doing most of the work of building out a feature enhancement
right?
The top three contributors to the reference implementation are also Google employees. https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/graphs/contributors?all=1
That’s what I was getting at, yes. (I contributed to both and am sitting with another core contributor right now.)
Why do browsers need to support every media format? Why can't it be shipped as a shared library for the whole system to use?
> Why can't it be shipped as a shared library for the whole system to use?
Flashbacks to DataTypes on the Amiga: https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Datatypes_Library
My favourite tidbit about the Amiga is that it was the first platform that got PNG support in all its web browsers: you just had to install the png.datatype.
AmigaOS was the first to bring a lot of smart ideas to a consumer platform.
I got my A1000 in late '85 and only had prior exposure to 8-bit home computers (C64, Atari, etc), CP/M and DOS (no mainframes, minis or workstations). I didn't actually use Macs or early Windows until the early 90s and it was shocking how backward they still seemed in some ways. I'd sort of the assumed the other major platforms were making similar advancements throughout the late 80s.
This way browser vendors control what their app supports, and won't have something break because a user doesn't have a library.
> Why can't it be shipped as a shared library for the whole system to use?
That's how it works on macOS; the bundled apps (Preview, Photos, etc.) gained support for JPEG XL.
Because browsers want to provide a consistent platform and can’t rely on OS vendors to do it in the way they need and prioritize their interests.
Given that there are more operating systems than browser engines these days, I'm not sure this would be an unequivocal win.
Eh. WebKit, Blink, Gecko being the big ones, supporting Windows, Linux (and alikes — maybe one would consider Android separate in this context) and Darwin (in this context iOS/macOS is the same). Mostly 1:1.
The thing is that it's still just a library, it just happened to be pre-installed. CGImage is just a helper in the Core Graphics library, not some magical "native"/"core" functionality in the OS that would be different than any other library with the same features.
An equivalent library for Linux (glycin for example), or per-format libraries like jxl-rs, are not "included in the OS", and tend to be the very same libraries one would use for Windows. If that does the trick on most platforms, then why have the maintenance burden of doing something different on macOS if all it does is save a few bytes on disk?
From Google's perspective, they would likely not want Chrome for macOS to gain support for jxl as the sole platform anyway, even if they are using CGImage and could decode it that way...
I'd definitely consider Android separate from Linux, yes. Their multimedia subsystems are completely different. The same applies to tons of embedded Linux platforms running an embedded Chromium or WebKit.
Browsers have also largely switched to handling most aspects of TLS and certificates themselves, despite there being OS libraries for those as well; the same applies to HTTP.
Google seems to prefer reimplementing every portion of an OS possible in Chrome.
If you want things to work every single time on a billion different devices this is how you do it.
Yeah, and then 100 different apps can repackage the browser engine as an Electron app, each weigh 300+mb.
I saw this recently with Balena etcher. It's a firmware flashing app with about 10 buttons total. It's over 400mb because it's written in node and has an electron GUI.
Good jerb.
When your flashing app starts getting bigger than the operating systems it's writing, you should start asking yourself some questions.
Etcher truly is the clowniest Electron app of them all.Better and similar size:
pv has a progress bar and nicer syntax. Next time you need to write an image, try: The -Y makes it sync after each write so that the progress bar represents actual progress instead of just how fast you can copy to kernel write buffers.My life improved measurably after I contributed that '-o' flag to pv and it then made its way into all my systems through regular OS updates :)
Long live dd! Except every time I use it I am terrified I'll blow out the brains of the wrong device :/
Another example clown app: the MacOS downloads of TuxGuitar, a Java app, used to just ship as a zip with a big jar in it. Now it ships an entire Java Runtime environment specific to your processor architecture. It's 480MB. Derp.
But it is a shared library? It's used in both Chrome and Firefox.
Which both vendor it.
Such an important piece of software does not want to subject itself to the packaging and support woes of shared libraries. There are security issues, maintainability issues, and much more headache by going with that approach.
Static linking is one and done, headache gone. People have large drives these days, so it's not a problem.
There are areas where the browser will dynamically link, but those are more OS-related than image and file format codecs.
> removed a while ago and them seemingly not being interested in supporting it
Removed because no one from Google benifits from supporting it then.
Re-added because someone could get a promotion by supporting it now.
> nobody benifits from supporting it
Do you mean the users of the browsers not benefitting, or specific Google employees/stakeholders?
What a silly question, Google has never cared about users.
Yes, I meant Google employees/stakeholders.
They always abandon shit like this.
There were obviously some internal politics going on—Google joined the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium of the who's who of the media/tech industry: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Nvidia… the list goes on. They supported AVIF as the next generation image format.
Google apparently wanted to be one of the "cool kids" supporting AVIF. When they removed the JPEG XL code from Chrome, they created the excuse that there was little demand for it, along with some other disingenuous talking points that didn't quite make sense. Ironically the project that ended up becoming JPEG XL was started by Google employees in Switzerland.
Anyway, I’m glad Google is supporting JPEG XL now. I wanted to use JPEG XL files for a project I started a month ago, but it was a non-starter with global usage under 20% at the time.
Removed because having yet another giant C codec was a huge risk, re-added because the PDF Association chose JXL as their next image format so anyone rendering PDFs (including browsers) is now required to have it.
"Required" is a strong word. More than enough people use Chrome as a PDF viewer that if Google decided to not support JXL, you'd see ~0 PDFs with it.
Another giant codec is only a huge risk if you run the decoder in the renderer process, which they say in the linked thread they do, but I don't see a sane reason why.
I'm sure if they asked the secret Gemini 4.0 AGI to use their existing very good sandbox to throw all the decoders in their own process and only share the image buffers, it could do it in a few hours.
> Removed because having yet another giant C codec was a huge risk
Removed because trillion dollar advertising company don't bother, which also happens to be the browser vendor monopoly.
How many man-hour effort does it take to create jxl-rs ?
https://github.com/libjxl/jxl-rs/graphs/contributors
But Google is responsible for jxl-rs. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/jpeg-xl-in-chrome#safety_f...
See previous HN discussions for context:
Google set to deprecate JPEG XL support in Chrome 110 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33399940
JPEG XL support has officially been removed from Chromium - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33933208
Chrome Jpegxl Issue Reopened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46033330
The case agains JPEG XL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690554
Glad to see it happen. I'd prefer it there was just one format rather than both jxl and avif, but at least it's the final nail in the coffin of webp which seems to have accomplished little but annoy people for not much gain.
The wider ecosystem support is still far from commonplace, but it is slowly changing. iOS 18 wouldn't work with .jxl in Photos, but 27 does. Similarly, quick look and preview works fine on MacOS 27, thumbnails show up properly etc. I also found no issues with .jxl on linux, and image editors are slowly adding support as well.
Plain old jpg will still be everywhere for the next decade, but I'm glad that we finally have superior options with no real downsides, and without all the patent bullshit to boot.
What issue do people have with webp?
Still can't upload it to every site that takes images, my file browser doesn't preview them nicely for whatever reason, that kind of stuff.
I wonder how much lack of support is due to the name that seems to self-imply that it's only for the web.
Seems like terrible branding if it wants to be taken seriously as a standard.
Poor support makes it feel like a form of DRM.
Poor support in some instances. Apple lagged for a long time for iPhone support. Discord mobile still does not support animated webp's.
(I work for discord)
Discord Mobile absolutely supports animated WebP (in fact I just tried uploading one to make sure I wasn't hallucinating here).
Well while you're here, there definitely are some issues with animated image support. Just earlier this week I attempted to use an animated .avif as my avatar image. It uploaded fine, the preview showed it fine, but the actual applied image was static again. Not sure if there's some issues with in the pipeline to handle those.
Surely support is even worse for both .jxl and .avif? If the annoying thing about .webp was lack of support, I don't think .jxl nor .avif solve any of that - just the opposite.
One thing to note is that even when WebP did eventually get support in many places, it often look a very long time because there just wasn’t that much motive or interest to support it. So for years it was the weird format you’d accidentally download from the web and have little luck getting to work off-line.
The non-exhaustive table linked below shows how long it took for different programs to support different image formats since their introduction. Outside of Chrome, Chrome in disguise, and whatever has become of Firefox, adoption of JPEG XL has been far more enthusiastic than it ever has for WebP—or AVIF, for that matter. So we are very unlikely to have a long period when JPEG XL only works on the web and nowhere else.
https://cloudinary.com/blog/2026-the-year-of-jpeg-xl#_strong...
Right, due to slim support outside of browsers, webp files kinda turned into lumps of coal when downloaded, going from the image you wanted to a chunk of data that nothing but the browser knew what to do with. It was like the file format version of those fake-transparent PNGs with checkerboard background.
> even at the time of writing, inserting a WebP in a Google Docs results in “unsupported image type.”
This is pretty wild. Google can't align their own tools for it?
webp = VP8 image
Nothing wrong with that per se, it's just old and limited, especially compared to avif/AV1 which would be like a theoretical VP10 at this point.
Every time a new image format comes out, I think about the compatibility crisis between apps.
E.g. Telegram still doesn't have sane support for .webp, it treats them as stickers. MacOS can take a long time to update with support for new formats. Image viewer apps even longer, many never updating to support new formats.
JPEG-XL is not particularly patent-laden and its license is correct for the use-case.
Other than the complexity of its implementation, there is very-little-to-no business nor technical reason not to use it or include it.
It has every right to be "the" image format for the next 20-odd years. Excellent compression, excellent lossless mode, transparency, etc. etc.
And probably my favorite feature- progressive rendering, which means you never have to make thumbnails ever again, you just truncate the output stream at the right proportion of pixel data (!)
iOS also now supports it natively for the photos it takes... but only if you have a newer iPhone than mine (a 15 Pro Max).
I think the bigger driver is that, due to it being the next PDF image format, most platforms will already be forced to add some form of support to it.
When literally every OS already comes with a form of libjxl pre-installed there is no good reason not to add support for it.
> you just truncate the output stream at the right proportion of pixel data
Does the format have explicit support for this? As in, is there any easy way to do, say, an exact Range request after reading the file header?
That doesn’t seem related to the codec itself but rather how you fetch said image.
Worst case scenario you should be able to add some smarts to the server and a query string such that the client can request 5% of the file or whatever simply by fiddling with the url.
> you never have to make thumbnails ever again, you just truncate the output stream at the right proportion of pixel data (!)
It's an attack vector for images to have different thumbnail/first bytes than the final image so software still have to decode the whole image.
How would that work in an attack?
>JPEG-XL is not particularly patent-laden and its license is correct for the use-case.
The same could be said for .webm, but Apple refused to support it because they wanted to patent-laden alternative to thrive.
> Apple refused to support it because they wanted to patent-laden alternative to thrive.
Where do people get this stuff?
Apple finally supported WebP in 2020, 10 years after it was released by Google. Firefox added WebP support in 2019, a year before Safari. Was Mozilla also part of conspiracy to undermine WebP? Come on now.
Seems to me neither Apple or Mozilla wanted to be forced to support a format they had no say in developing. Usually there's a process for coming to consensus on standards.
WebP is ubiquitous now, not the case in 2010 when it was released.
It had advantages compared to JPEG, but not enough at the time to justify changing workflows, etc. WebP initially had better compression than JPEG, but as encoders/decoders improved (MozJPEG, Jpegli, turbo-libjpeg, Guetzli) the lead WebP had mostly went away regarding compression and visual fidelity.
Going forward, WebP is becoming less relevant by the day; it doesn't support wide gamut color; it only supports RGB. It's max pixel count is quite limited compared to AVIF and JPEG XL. Newer formats have use cases beyond the web; WebP doesn't.
Can progressive loading be made less fine-grained? With too many levels you don't know, if image is still loading or is just low-res.
Loading vs loaded difference needs to be clear.
AFAIK that's just a case of choosing how many scans to use at encode time
The problem with progressive rendering is that the user never knows when downloading is complete unless you add loaders to each image.
> MacOS can take a long time to update with support for new formats.
Apple added JPEG XL support for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS in September 2023 [1]; iPhone 17 Pro/Pro Max added support for JPEG XL Lossy and Lossless compression for ProRAW pictures last year [2].
When Apple adopts jxl-rs, Safari, Chrome and Firefox will use the same JPEG XL decoder.
[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/14445/webkit-features-in-safari-17-0...
[2]: "iPhone 17 Pro’s Camera Leap: JPEG‑XL, Cleaner Shots, and Pro Filmmaking Tools" - https://modernengineeringmarvels.com/2025/09/19/iphone-17-pr...
When Apple adopts jxl-rs? Any source for them doing that? I can’t think of any Rust code that Apple is shipping.
True, but in my opinion JPEG XL has the right balance of features to become a true replacement of almost every relevant image format we use today, on the web and elsewhere.
Nothing is perfect and niche formats will always be necessary but I think JPEG XL has a good chance to become the USB of image formats.
Yeah. Here is a surprisingly readable article on all the supported features and design decisions of JPEG XL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05987
The format is designed to be as general as possible, potentially replacing many common (JPEG, GIF, PNG) and professional image formats.
For example, JPEG XL supports pages (e.g. for comic books), layers (with variable frame sizes, positions and blend modes) and timed animations.
I wish they had kept the support for progressive decoding of animations just like FLIF had but I guess they had to draw the complexity line somewhere.
That was indeed surprisingly readable and very in-depth at the same time. Thanks for sharing!
How about AVIF?
I have not read that many direct comparisons here.
Much worse at lossless at least.
Depends on who you listen to, or what you test it on. It goes either way, and avif is typically significantly better at small files sizes where loading speed (or saving data) is the priority.
Really? The lossless comparisons I've seen has JXL winning over AVIF, do you have a link to the comparisons you've seen where AVIF wins in lossless?
On lossless? No.
It's too bad that the concept of having a system-wide plugin architecture for importing/exporting formats never caught on outside a few niche platforms. AmigaOS had DataTypes back in the '80s, and BeOS had Translators back in the '90s.
The Linux/FOSS world kind of approximates this just because applications are often built against the same underlying libraries and utilities, e.g ImageMagick or FFMpeg, rather than implementing their own import/export filters, but it'd be nice to be able to install a single system-wide datatype library for a specific format, and have all of my existing software instantly be able to read and write it.
Windows has, for a while, had Windows Imaging Component for images (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wic/-wic-lh) and Microsoft Media Foundation for video (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/medfound/mic...). Not sure how widespread actual use is though.
WIC is reasonably widely used since it's used by WPF to load images. The problem is that a plugin codec structure exposes you to bad codecs. We had a tool at work break because someone installed a fast image viewer that overrode the default WIC JPEG decoder with a faster one that crashed loading our tool's splash screen image.
Codecs have been a thing on both major OSes, Windows Media Player could open DivX and QuickTime could open MKV. I think they were only limited to videos however.
I think QuickTime 7 had that capability (I remember installing a codec to make it play wmv video) but Apple removed the plugin architecture in QuickTime X.
Ugh. Every time I accidentally put a HEIC on my Windows machine, or one of my students tries to upload a WEBP to our school's LMS :/
The user's OS or the LMS should offer to convert it on the spot. Worst case to .bmp
If I remember correctly Instagram didn't support WebP either.
The tortoises have somehow outrun the hare because Safari still hasn't turned on progressive loading in libjxl (which had this feature since before Safari added the feature), while FF (non Android) and Chrome shipped with it enabled. The 3 year long chess clock is now flipped.
One downside is that you cannot tell if format lossy or lossless by looking at its extension.
You can’t really do that with PNG today either, because of all the PNG optimizers that quantize images before encoding them to PNG for better compression.
Independent preprocessing doesn't make PNG itself lossy.
The point is that you can’t tell whether it’s a lossless image by looking at the extension.
It's not the PNG encoding that causes the loss. The optimisers are literally creating a different image and then losslessly encoding it as PNG.
But it's also a valid point.
Yes, but a lossless encode of a lossy copy of an image results in a lossy image functionally.
That's true of WebP and AVIF as well. I think all modern image codecs have both lossy and lossless modes - the separation between JPEG for lossy and PNG for lossless seems to be a historical oddity.
And a nominally “lossless” image may have been reencoded from a lossy source.
This is something that can be addressed by file managers - showing a metadata entry on whether it's lossy or lossless. File extension (along with the bifurcated mainstream adoption of JPEG and PNG) has been a great proxy to do this, but like others noted, can be deceptive, which is arguably worse.
You cannot tell it just from the extension either. If you like extensions, you can use a '.lossless.jxl'. And in general for most formats, you can use metadata to store that info (also doesn't guarantee anything)
This is indeed frustrating, though realistically not that big of a deal for most users, especially if you consider lossless as just highest quality. Though personally I think it makes sense to have different extensions by convention for lossless and animated images.
It's a big deal :(
JPEG artifacts are literally a meme, normal people are aware of this stuff.
I hold the extremist view that had we decided to use .png for lossless webps, it would have been an overall net gain - in people's minds "png" maps roughly to "whoever last touched this image didn't do anything evil to it" - very few people care how the data is actually encoded.
ah, that's a good point.
perhaps use .ll.jxl to indicate "lossless jpegxl" informally?
prior art: I've been using .frontmatter.md or .fm.md for markdown files with frontmatter
I've been wishing for years that all of these codecs with hybrid lossless/lossy modes would just add a single l to their file extensions, purely for the annoyance of it.
Like, you can do this individually, but it's not the same thing as actually having it in the standard.
Does the L stand for lossy, or lossless? Or large, as in this case?
See I would think lossless is the one you have to specify. (Also, it stops being "large" when you extend this gripe to similar formats like AVIF and WebP.)
One L for Lossy, two for LossLess.
Does the one at the end of .JXL count toward the total? Nobody knows what it stands for anyway.
Multiple extensions typically denote nested filetypes.
Like files.tar.xz may be decompressed with xz and then extracted with tar to get the directory "files".
I think in your case .md.fm would be a greater fit, as the front matter is read first. Or just .fmd
I can't really think of a scenario where that would be useful? File-size is more indicative of quality anyway.
Nice. I added support for JXL to a low traffic chan board after Firefox added experimental support. I would honestly be surprised if anyone ever upload anything in that format but I can see some use cases for it after reading this thread. I am curious if some day JXL would ever be as popular as JPG or PNG and what would drive that change. Art sites perhaps? Maybe DeviantArt could add support for it.
Art sites get the biggest gain with JXL. They can losslessly repackage every single JPEG uploads they have for practically zero cost. Existing PNG can also be losslessly compressed to JXL too, and just wrapping JXL around PNG yields improved compression (Note for last part: it is still in proposal status)
Drat! I hoped this was going to cover the internal battle where Google executives trying to stop JPEG XL and how engineers finally convinced them to change their minds.
My guess: the engineers didn’t win the argument. The executives just gave up once all the other browsers had added support.
> The executives just gave up once all the other browsers had added support.
The big turning point seemed to have been Adobe adopting JpegXL as an approved image compression algorithm for the upcoming PDF spec. update. With that, since all browsers seem to also want to be PDF renderers, meant they had no choice but to include a JpegXL decoder. The win, if there was one here, was that the decoder they have to ship anyway now was exposed for use by <img> tags as well as by the PDF renderer.
It's interesting how different theories come about when there is a lack of information and a high degree of preexisting bias. Reality is a lot simpler - it wasn't deemed worth the cost of addressing the security problems in the existing library so someone chose to abandon the format. However as industry adoption increased and a newer safe library appeared, the decision was changed. Also, note that while Google developed the new rust library, it wasn't the chrome team who made the investment.
> Reality is a lot simpler - it wasn't deemed worth the cost of addressing the security problems in the existing library so someone chose to abandon the format.
As evidenced by what? When first rejecting JPEG XL, Google did share their reasoning, but security problems hardly figured in it.
That's... not what happened? See the timeline I posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445897
JPEG XL is largely a Google effort including in creating the specification, the reference implementation and later a safer Rust implementation. Why would Google executives want to stop it? From what I gather it's Chrome engineers that didn't want it because it was huge, had little adoption (at the time), and was rather redundant with AVIF and WebP (for Web purposes). Not saying they didn't have related mandates from executives but they also have a lot of say in what goes in and what doesn't.
> Why would Google executives want to stop it?
Google and Mozilla executives. The 'why' is not public knowledge. Maybe someone has a personal vendetta against some people involved in jxl.
My guess is that Apple supporting it natively in iOS (there's an option in iPhone 16+ to save taken photos as JPEG-XL instead of Apple's proprietary format) likely also pushed the needle
You made me check. iOS only supports JXL in ProRAW mode, which (I hope) most people don't use.
Doesn't that mean you can natively render JXL anyway? Which is what I think they were suggesting.
I think it might have something to do with a Rust based decoder becoming available. IIRC one of the reasons for not implementing it before was expanding the attack surface.
They added enough fear/uncertainty/doubt around jpeg xl that no sane organization will adopt it now. God Google might decide to remove support again in 2027
I thought the reasoning was Google wanted to cartel their own fledgling webp format and didn't want to promote competition?
WebP is 15 years old, and Google cares about it less than anybody else. Pretty much everybody else supports WebP but Google can’t even be bothered adding support for it to Google Docs.
Google is one of the main developers of Jpeg XL.
I'll kind of miss (not actually) the early 2000s codec vibe I get when I share an image with people on Signal and half of them say, "I can't view it."
I love the codec and am glad to see it supported again. They overcame the security issues using a rust SIMD port. I wonder what "approximately as fast as the best non-memory-safe alternative" means - the wording suggests they didn't beat the C++ implementation, but how close is it?
Here's a benchmark over time of jxl-rs (Rust) vs libjxl (C++) across both memory usage and performance: https://jxl-rs-perf.lucaversari.it/. I'm inclined to trust that it's a decent benchmark since it's from Luca Versari, a key person in the original JPEG XL standardization effort and development of libjxl, and is now the main developer of jxl-rs.
Seems to be between a little and a lot faster in almost all of the tests.
Watching the example image load I had this flashback of the past, where images were 256 color interlaced GIFs, downloading slowly, line by line...
I have a feeling that progressive loaders got downgraded along the way for whatever reason. I remember seeing progressive JPEGs and PNGs also load... progressively. JPEG even often had a grayscale-like first layer.
Yeah, the conservative loaders took over.
I’ll see myself out.
So it's supported now by all the major browsers (Firefox support coming soon) as well as all the major OSes.
I believe it's been available in Firefox for a while now, just behind a feature flag
Firefox 158 will ship with it on by default: https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/3YM...
Next up: Phones and cameras. It would be so great to have a common image format again after years of fragmentation.
iPhones have supported it for 3 years.
Taking photos in JPEG XL? That's what I meant; the consumer side is nice, but if everybody keeps taking AVIF, HEIC, and JPEGs, we're missing an important part. (Sure, smaller websites are nice too, but I can have that today with WebP, as CDNs need to serve multiple formats anyway.)
The timetable looks promising: https://cloudinary.com/blog/2026-the-year-of-jpeg-xl#_strong...
Took them long enough with a few embarassing detours, but a welcome news nonetheless! Has anyone ~blogged about some of the internal dynamics that lead the G ship to course-correct, would be curious to read?
I doubt anyone that wants to keep their job in big tech would ever publish something like that.
Wanted to use this for building a viewer for astronomical imagery but the decoder resamples to 8 bits internally unfortunately.
Have to stick with AVIF which supports up to 12 bits.
Are they switching it on in Android Chrome? That would complete the picture of at least baseline support... eventually... when a decent percentage of Android phones actually get that version.
But Safari (MacOS or iOS) still doesn't support the progressive rendering shown here, nor animation, if caniuse is up to date:
https://caniuse.com/jpegxl
Not to be a downer — it's one necessary step on the road.
Is jpegxl support in canvas toBlob planned?
Any way for those who enjoy dynamic languages (non-Python) to call it via FFI?
After some time, this seems to be the first image format, now in production, not being just the nus product of some video format.
Fun fact, I needed JPEG XL support for my C++ pipeline and I didn't feel like including any official libraries. Roughly $500 tokens later I had a fully working optimized JPEG XL spec compliant en/de/coder that outperformed the official codepaths (both cpp and rust) by 70% (lower runtime). Took literally 5 hours to build out. Can someone tell me what Google is doing?
So do you think your implementation is better? Or there are finer parts of the spec it’s missing?
Your llm has JPEG xl programs in the training data. You copied from GitHub.
Does it satisfy the rule of two?
> Does it satisfy the rule of two?
One to embody power, the other one to crave it?
I'm confused about the connection.
Two safety protection mechanisms. For example: Rust + Sandbox.
If it’s sandboxed why do I need rust?
What counts as a “safety mechanism”?
Yep.
Is this the same patent/license nightmare as JPEG2000 ?
No, JPEG XL is an open standard.
"open" in the sense that you have to pay $200 to read it, anyway.
That's good to hear. Let's hope there's hardware adoption on the camera end soon. As an image lib maintainer the codec wars were driving me nuts.
About three years ago I had to find a replacement for old .jpg files and .png files.
The main two contenders were .avif and .webp. For a few reasons, I selected .avif and in hindsight I think it was the better, choice. Both would be objectively better than jpg or png.
With JPEG XL ... hmmm. AVIF is not perfect, in particular when the compression rate is very high I noticed that some photos lose a lot of intrinsic quality that is not instantly obvious; I noticed this when I took various pictures over the years from outdoors. Still, AVIF beats jpg and png just about on every metric when compression is required. With JPEG XL I guess I have to re-evaluate, but right now I am still sticking to avif. The two factors that will be important for me is compression ratio and quality. I am ok with a bit of loss of quality, if the compression is better, but I am not sure JPEG XL beats AVIF here clearly either, so I am not sure what to do with JPEG XL.
Both JPEG XL and WebP far exceed AVIF when it comes to lossless. For lossy, AVIF used to do better at low quality and JPEG XL at high quality. But apparently AV1 encoders have improved a lot since then, closing the distance. An article comparing the two was posted recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690554
The author, who has worked on said AV1 encoders, has expressed doubt that JPEG XL encoders could improve much with only reasonable amounts of effort, but that was also only their personal (if educated) guess. With JPEG XL finally seeing adoption on the web, we will hopefully see work on the reference encoder resume in earnest soon.
So for now, I’d say you’re fine with AVIF. Unless you’re doing lossless, because AVIF sucks at lossless. (And JPEG XL has the unique feature of supporting lossless JPEG transcoding, too.)
I thing the endgame is lossless PNG with 16bit color components with basic compression like gzip or at best bzip2. Or a format without the weirdness of PNG 'line based loading' which is obsolete nowdays. The "expensive part", apart from the compression algorithm, being the meta data storage without kludge.
You can’t just ignore signal compression algorithms unless you are fine allocating 4-5x more bandwidth to images.
>without the weirdness of PNG 'line based loading' which is obsolete nowdays
How? Line-based loading is a very simple way to exploit 2D spatial coherence. A 1D format like gzip loses this advantage for minimal gain in simplicity.
I believe 7zip outdoes bzip2 these days along every metric
And lossless jpeg-xl exceeds your idea
7zip meaning what, LZMA (xz)?
and zstandard outdoes 7zip (LZMA)
These days I favour lossless WEBP instead of PNG. I often save around 30%~40% of file size compared to PNG, especially when the PNG is encoded with lots of bits per pixel (i.e 48 bits or 24 bits).
I think that’s why they were advocating for gzip or bzip2 instead of just relying on PNG’s built-in compression.
what a terrible name
What would be a better name?
What's wrong with JPEG 40?
50 times smaller than JPEG 2000.
> built-in HDR support
Oh hell no. HDR is already bad enough in Youtube on iOS where there seems to be no way to turn it off - you tune your brightness to something decent in bed... and then some video by some showoff dingus scrolls across the feed frying your eyeballs.
Fuck HDR or at the very least give people an option to turn it off!
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...
this does not help me against malicious or incompetent website authors. Mobile browsers usually do not have support for user stylesheets.
Mobile Firefox let's me add Stylus and I assume other extensions like whatever the modern Greasemonkey is. So at least one of the good mobile browsers does support it.
If you're using a mobile browser without extension support, you should tell the devs of it to work on that.
I will say windows implementation of HDR - at least the way Chrome handles it within Windows is somewhat of an abomination - so I'm sure Apple's iOS is just as poor!
but sometimes it's not HDRs fault - it's just the segura effect. People with cameras exceeding their capability levels, not understanding what you need to do after you shoot video in LOG.
I mix multi-monitor some-HDR some-SDR in Windows, it's bad.
Nah iOS really cranks up the screen brightness to display HDR content.
obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/
It's great that Chrome is shipping JPEGXL.
AVIF is still better at 1 bit per pixel and less. (JPEGXL is more efficient at more than that.) Is it possible for JPEGXL to beat that?
I do not know if JPEG XL is competitive with AVIF for very compressed images, because that is mostly a concern for those who want to host at a minimum cost Web pages with embedded images. I assume that AVIF must be better for that purpose.
On the other hand, AVIF cannot compete with JPEG XL for high-quality photographs, which is something much more important for me, because it is a format suitable for storing my own photographs and it is a format that would make me appreciate positively a Web site that would have beautiful images in this format.
That isn’t my experience. I tried compressing conference proceedings into thumbnails with tiny file size and for this purpose I found that JPEGXL is far better than AVIF
They need to relay on Rust to write safe code…
is that a bad thing?