They'll do literally anything rather than implementing JPEG XL over AVIF in Chrome, huh?
I mean, of course this is still valuable (JPEG-only consumers will probably be around for decades, just like MP3-only players), and I realize Google is a large company, but man, the optics on this...
I have no love for Google, at all.
It's really hard to say this in public, because people are treating it like a divisive "us or them" issue that's obvious, but the JPEG-XL stuff is _weird_.
I've been in codecs for 15 years, and have never seen as unconstructive behavior like the JPEG-XL work. If I had infinite time and money and it came across my plate, we'd have a year or two of constructive work to do, so we didn't just rush something in with obvious issues and opportunities.
It turned into "just figure out how to merge it in, and if you don't like it, that's malfeasance!" Bread and circus for commentators, maybe, but, actively preventing even foundational elements of a successful effort.
To be honest, at Google scale, if there's an objectively good new codec with some early signs of excitement and plausible industry traction, and even Apple managed to deploy it to virtually all of their devices (and Apple isn't exactly known as an "open codec forward" company), not integrating it does seem like either malfeasance or gross organizational dysfunction to me.
Completely hypothetical scenario: what if the technical reaction was so hostile they invested in it themselves to fix the issues and make it sustainable?
In light of the recent security incident, I'd see that completely hypothetical situation as more admirable.
Hm, are you suggesting they're currently in the process of reimplementing it in a safer and/or more maintainable way as part of Chrome?
In that case, that would just be extremely bad messaging (which I also wouldn't put past Google). Why agitate half of the people on here and in other tech-affine parts of the Internet when they could have just publicly stated that they're working on it and to please have some patience?
Public support by Google, even if it's just in the form of a vague "intent to implement", would be so important for a nascent JPEG successor.
See comment on peer (TL;DR: I agree, and that's the substance of the post we're commenting on)
Your posts here seem of the “just asking questions” variety—no substance other than being counterculture. Do you have any proof or resemblance of any logical reason to think this?
It's a gentle joke, it happened, that's TFA. (ex. see the other threads re: it started from the JPEG XL repo).
I use asking questions as a way to keep contentious discussions on track without being boorish. And you're right, it can easily be smarmy instead of Socratic without tone, a la the classic internet sarcasm problem.
Gentle note: I only asked one question, and only in the post you replied to.
Whatever are you referring to? JPEG XL had already been merged into Chromium, prior to being removed again (without a proper reason ever given). As far as I know, the JPEG XL developers have offered to do whatever work was necessary for Chromium specifically, but were never taken up on the offer.
Same thing with Firefox, which has had basic support merged into Nightly, and a couple more patches gathering dust due to lack of involvement from the side of Firefox. Mozilla has since decided to take a neutral stance on JPEG XL, seemingly without doing any kind of proper evaluation. Many other programs (like GIMP, Krita, Safari, Affinity, darktable) already support JPEG XL.
People are not getting upset because projects don’t invest their resources into supporting JPEG XL. People are getting upset because Google (most notably), which has a decisive say in format interoperability, is flat out refusing to give JPEG XL a fair consideration. If they came up with a list of fair conditions JPEG XL has to meet to earn their support, people could work towards that goal, and if JPEG XL failed to meet them, people would easily come to terms with it. Instead, Google has chosen to apply double standards, present vague requirements, and refuse to elaborate. If anyone is ‘preventing even foundational elements of a successful effort’, it’s Google, or more specifically, the part that’s responsible for Chromium.
has had basic support merged
I read the parent post as saying that this is the problem, i.e. that "complete" support is a mess, because AFAIK even the reference implementation is incomplete and buggy, and that then getting angry at the consumers of it is besides the point and won't lead anywhere (which is what we see in practice).
Browsers supporting a format "a little" is almost worse than not supporting it at all, because it makes the compatibility and interoperability problems worse.
It isn't not accepting it or hostile. That is completely not true.
They actively push against JPEG XL, despite all the data, prior to even 1.0 suggest it is or could be better than AVIF in many cases. To the point where they even make up false benchmarks to downplay JPEG XL.
Companies were even willing to paid ( wont name ) and put resources into getting JPEG XL because they see it to be so good. But they still refused.
It is at this point people thought something doggy is going on. And then not only did Google not explain themselves. They were even more hostile.
So why the extra hate? Well partly because this is a company who gave us an over promised WebP and underdelivered.
If you do creative work countless tools just don’t support webp, AVIF or HEIF.
It’s so prominent running into files you can’t open in your tools that I have a right click convert to PNG context menu
They don’t support it because Chromium doesn’t.
Because Chromium doesn’t support it, Electron doesn’t.
Because Electron doesn’t, Teams and other modern web apps and web sites don’t either, etc…
If Google just added JPEG XL support instead then it would be… a supported alternative to JPEG.
You’re saying working in that is a waste of time because… it’s not supported.
There's a lot more to format support than Chromium. There's a pretty strong meme out there on the Internet that webp is evil despite being supported in all browsers for years because there's still a lot of software out there that never added support and people get annoyed when an image fails to open.
maybe proprietary software just isnt so good?
I don't think it's evil, but I just don't think it's very good either.
And a graphics format better be damn good (i.e. much, not just a little bit, better than what it's hoping to replace) if it aspires to become widely supported across applications, operating systems, libraries etc.
At least now with Jpegli, this will surely be the nail in the coffin for WebP?
The article has 35% compression improvements over JPEG mentioned and that's at least as much as usually thrown around when discussing WebP.
Chromium does support WebP and AVIF, yet parent's tools don't.
Maybe because WebP and AVIF are actually not that great image formats. WebP has been critiqued as a very mediocre improvement over JPEG all the way since its introduction.
These formats are in Chromium because of Google politics, not because of their technical merit.
Talking about things that don’t pass through webtech photoshop, after effects, illustrator, Final Cut, davinchi, 3d software, rendering engines etc
Before making that kind of claim, I would spend some time looking at the names of the folks who contributed heavily to the development of JPEG XL and the names of the folks who wrote jpegli.
By "they" I mean "Google, the organization", not "the authors of this work", who most likely have zero say in decisions concerning Chrome.
Chrome advised and inspired this work in their position about JPEG XL.
Here: https://www.mail-archive.com/blink-dev@chromium.org/msg04351...
"can we optimize existing formats to meet any new use-cases, rather than adding support for an additional format"
It's a yes!
Of course full JPEG XL is quite a bit better still, but this helps old compatible JPEG to support HDR without 8-bit banding artefacts or gainmaps, gives a higher bit depth for other uses where more precision is valuable, and quite a bit better compression, too.
Reminds me of "You Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not You Could, You Didn't Stop To Think If You Should."
The arithmetic coding feature was already painful enough. I'm simply not in need of yet another thing that makes jpeg files more complicated to deal with.
Did that ever happen?
I don't see any downsides with Jpegli. Your Linux distro admin exchanges the lib for you, you never need to think about it, only get smaller and more beautiful files. If you use commercial software (Apple, Adobe, mobile phone cameras, Microsoft, ...) hopefully they migrate by themselves.
If they don't, literally nothing happens.
I fail to see a major downside. Perhaps open up your thinking on this?
Yes, Chrome published data.
People said the same thing last time and it took more than 10 years until decoding worked reliably. I'm simply not interested in dealing with another JPEG++.
Nah, I'm fine. I went JXL-only for anything new I'm publishing, and if people need to switch browsers to see it – so be it.
It's not a new JPEG++. It creates old JPEGs, fully 100% compatible.
(Of course JXL is better still.)
Only within pretty narrow limits.
Classic JPEG will never be as efficient given its age, in the same way that LAME is doing incredible things for MP3 quality, but any mediocre AAC encoder still blows it out of the water.
This is in addition to the things you've already mentioned (HDR) and other new features (support for lossless coding).
And I'd find their sentiment much easier to believe if Google/Chrome weren't hell-bent on making WebP (or more recently AVIF) a thing themselves! That's two formats essentially nobody outside of Google has ever asked for, yet they're part of Chrome and Android.
Despite the answer being yes, IMO it's pretty clear that the question is disingenuous, otherwise why did they add support for WebP and AVIF? The question applies equally to them.
Some authors of this are also the authors of JPEG XL.
I saw that. It's the tragedy of Google in a nutshell: Great things are being worked on in some departments, but organizational dysfunction virtually ensures that the majority of them will not end up in users' hands (or at least not for long).
This is work from Google research outside US. You could even call it a different company with the same name. It is Google US who made those AOM / AVIF decisions.
Why no blame on Mozilla for ignoring format as well?
Mozilla only does what Google tells them.