To be honest I kind of understand where Google was coming from with dropping jxl. But now with Apple throwing their weight behind it, the situation has drastically changed. I really do hope they bring it back.
I'm curious what there is to understand -- this just a selfish decision they are making, right? Not including JPEG XL is worse for users, developers, and the ecosystem.
When it was removed, no other browser supported JPEG XL, and no other browser had expressed an intent to do it. The last thing the web needs is more image formats with limited support. (Could they even have supported it consistently across platforms due to the iOS limitation on all browsers needing to be implemented on WebKit?)
Apple implementing JPEG XL in Safari changes that. Now it's a format with a real chance of being supported across the whole ecosystem.
> Apple implementing JPEG XL in Safari changes that. Now it's a format with a real chance of being supported across the whole ecosystem.
As I’ve mentioned in other threads, I don’t believe the Chrome team didn’t know Apple was going to implement JPEG XL.
There’s lots of communication between the Chrome and WebKit teams.
It’s going to take more than just Apple shipping JPEG XL to perhaps change Google’s point of view; JPEG XL needs to be seen as a game changer that moves the needle.
Yes, it was true for WebP for like a decade. One of the many issues WebP had. Isn't it good to learn from the mistake of WebP, rather than repeat it?
(AVIF was not supported by all browsers on day 1, obviously, but all the major browsers were governing members of the foundation developing it. So it was much more clear that the backing was there across the ecosystem.)
They explicitly said they were disabling it because nobody cares and no industry players were behind in. Not some kind of conspiracy, an actual objective evaluation. With Apple behind it, perhaps the activation energy will exist.
It was a clearly false statement when they said it. Adobe added JPEG XL to its products. Along with them, Facebook, flickr, and a bunch of other services expressed their eagerness to support the new format (because it is vastly superior to all prior image format options). Google decided it conflicted with their competitor format AVIF and axed the experiment.
> Google decided it conflicted with their competitor format AVIF
This is absolutely ridiculous take given JPEG XL is mainly authored by Google and Cloudinary, with AVIF coming from Netflix & alliance that includes Google.
There is no "competitor" here. Just a format nobody else indicated interest in supporting (notably Apple which forces ~half of mobile marked to have no support, given their browser engine restrictions).
Now that they added the support Chrome can easily bring it back.
1. There is nothing ridiculous about cutting another format, whether it is authored by them or not. They took a stand and it was Pro AOM.
2. There has never been another image format that has the level of support or interest as JEPG XL since JPEG becomes the internet standard. And that was before the drama of Chrome dropping support for it.
WebKit already added support for it if I remember correctly. It's just not on Safari so to speak since it uses the macOS stack for this, so it needs the OS itself to adopt it, but Apple was clearly interested in it.
And web browsers aren't the industry. Adobe added support for it, for example, and it didn't really seem like Google did a good-faith discussion with actual industry players, who range from content creation software to OS makers to other web browsers.
It's also not like there are people lining up to use AVIF right now and Google is still pushing for it.
