macOS 14 will support JPEG XL (opens in new tab)

You're using the term "OS" but you're not talking about OSes you're talking about kernels.

The OS is what comes with the computer or gets installed in the default setup if you're installing yourself. Most of it is userspace.

Distros like Arch & Gentoo allow you to build a custom OS which in doing so blurs the definition quite a lot, but ultimately when people say "macOS" that term includes quite a lot of userspace things. Bundled software is absolutely a core part of every popularly used definition of the word "OS".

As an ‘operating system’ OS X includes user space tools like the Finder and Quick Look in particular where vendor support is helpful.

Yes image codecs are a user space thing, but a Mac or iOS app probably loads images using the Swift Image or UIImage class and passes it a filename, and then these same objects get passed to the display widgets to render. If the UI toolkit that ships with the OS supports a format, it will just work with most all of the apps that use the system UI toolkit.

There’s just not a lot left besides user experience and appearance for an OS to do.

Of course kennels and operating systems are highly complex and represent a ton of work… but what is left to impress with a press release?

My OS does everything I can imagine needing it to and the only thing I can imagine wanting it to do going forward is more or less just maintenance (UX/UI excluded)

Dumb question, but why is OS or browser support necessary? Couldn't an HTML canvas element and some JS that can parse the file format display any kind of image that you might want?

> publish photos on the web that look like they came out of a mirrorless camera I want JPEG XL

Any comparision photos out there?

>As a mirrorless photographer who wants to publish photos on the web that look like they came out of a mirrorless camera I want JPEG XL.

As if people would have the screen to properly watch them? Perhaps a handful of high-end laptop owners... Except if those are the intended audience.

>image codecs are definitely a userspace thing and as a Windows or Linux user I never wait for my OS to support an image format, I just install the codec and code away.

That's how you get half the apps supporting them (if you're lucky) and others not, and generally a hell of a time...

This is the terrible explanation they gave for dropping support:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...

"Thank you everyone for your comments and feedback regarding JPEG XL. We will be removing the JPEG XL code and flag from Chromium for the following reasons:

- Experimental flags and code should not remain indefinitely

- There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL

- The new image format does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats to warrant enabling it by default

- By removing the flag and the code in M110, it reduces the maintenance burden and allows us to focus on improving existing formats in Chrome"

The issue on the Chromium tracker is now one of the most-starred and most-commented-on of all time because people from all over came to tell Google that they're insane, from Intel to Adobe to Facebook to Krita to Cloudinary to Shopify to Serif/Affinity to the VESA DisplayHDR Chairman.

It may also be worth noting that the author of commit to remove support from Chromium appears to be a WebP co-author, having given talks about WebP and being the primary contributor to libwebp.

https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/40...

https://chromium.googlesource.com/webm/libwebp/+log

They did all the work required to implement it, sat around for a few months, and then removed it, before anyone else even noticed it was there / had a chance to start integrating it.

My personal conspiracy theory is that some Google engineer who works on Chrome, came up with "JPEG XL support" as a feature they could work on, pushed it through to prod, patted themselves on the back, and forgot about it; but this was all done without first getting sign-off from whoever at Google is trying to push for WebP to be a thing. When that person or group noticed "Chrome now supports JPEG XL", they got that support ripped out.

The Googlers behind webp have more clout than the Googlers behind Jpeg XL.

JPEG XL has gained broader industry interest than any of the previous attempts to replace JPEG.

I think someone is very hurt that their web p pet project has earned more hate than love

From April: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/free-software-group-...

Discussed several times previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35589179

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33399940

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563378

>If the decision was intentional: did they state a reason why?

Yes It was intentional.

They stated AVIF is as good if not better than JPEG XL.

I think they want better compression. JXL has excellent lossless compression.

TIFF is a container, it can have payload with different compression schemes, lossy or lossless. Including JXL.

Not an expert either by far, but DICOM isn't just images, it's a much larger data structure and following protocol, which deals with the transmission of the data between devices as well. The files are just one part of it. It also supports more dimensions to the data frames other than 2D. The pixel data in DICOM itself uses JPEG however (among other potential pixel compression methods), and it is possible that JPEG XL rolled into DICOM could allow for benefits.

No, DICOM is a container format that can contain JPEG XL image data

Video is not lossless, a second of high quality video might be a total of 5 megabytes.

A mammogram on the other hand, might be 300 images of lossless 4k resolution, which could clock in at about 2 gigabytes. That could be per breast in a given study, and a study could have prior mammograms attached as well.

You will hit memory limits, so you need to be able to unload and load data intelligently and quickly.

https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/nvenc-v-qsv/ This site has WASM-decoded JXL images using JXL.js. Native support would be much faster, & trying to decode much larger images with JXL.js doesn’t work very well.

Images are opened and used in a lot of places that aren't browsers.

I think 12-bit colour stops it being adopted for ‘master’ images intended for editing. The current top comment says that 16-bit depth is a requirement for radiology. Also, I've read that its lossless encoding is often very poor — larger than PNG.

(I didn't downvote, BTW; it's a reasonable question.)

AVIF does not support progressive encoding.

the tldr is that video formats are relationship mediocre for images because the tradeoffs you make to compress an image that will be seen for 1/60th of a second are different than those for a static image.

They're suited for delivery because they're based on video codecs (WebP on VP8, AVIF on AV1) for which consumer hardware typically has hardware decoding support, but were not designed for still images. AVIF is newer and substantially better than WebP, but still has limited colour depth and channels, so it's comparatively poor for editing. Lossless mode is not good for non-photo content. Encoding is relatively slow without hardware support.

Yeah, that is all odd to me; Google cited lack of "interest from the entire ecosystem" (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...). Mozilla also had an experimental JXL implemenation out there. I'd hope, like you said, that the browser vendors had enough of a backchannel to keep a good thing from fizzling because each is uncertain if the others will implement it.

But if the Chrome folks did know they had all three major browser engines were ready to go, along with the positive noises from Facebook, Adobe, other parts of Google, and a few other notable folks, that seems like a solid base of support, unless you're really expecting the world to go all-in on a format before a browser supports it without a flag. So I guess I wonder if it's that the Chrome team had set the bar high, that they hadn't expected Apple to support JXL at the time they made the call, or something else.

Apple typically does not announce intent to implement things; they just implement them.

Those words were about the JPEG recompressor (Brunsli) specifically, which saves about 22% but has a smoother transition from today's .jpg world than any of the new lossy formats; you can bit-for-bit reconstruct the original JPEG from the Brunsli-compressed one, and it's certainly much faster than AVIF to encode with CPUs. You can even insert Brunsli as a Content-Encoding that's transparent to the user (so right click still saves .jpg), and Chrome had an issue open to consider doing that before they backed out JXL support.

Google is using the wrong tricks to keep marketshare.. I'm not even sure if they know it

Their justification was more that adding it would be committing a lot of hardware and software vendors to support it which would be very expensive for not enough gain.

Now that Apple supports it, people will want it.

Firefox has next to zero marketshare (unfortunately and despite my best efforts to get people to use FF). There was never any chance that Mozilla was going to waste their very limited resources attempting to be the early adopters of an image codec when nobody is going to use it on the web until the browser engine with de facto control over the market starts supporting it.

Not really.

AFAIK (correct me if I’m wrong!) first-party and third-party codecs in media players are kinda equal: you load a file, and the media player picks which codec to delegate that file to. You can’t do that in with a Chrome extension – the extensions can manipulate HTML and run custom JS, but that’s more or less it (plus some basic browser-level stuff like work with tabs and intercept network requests).

This doesn’t mean an extension isn’t possible at all – eg there’s https://github.com/zamfofex/jxl-crx/ that detects JXL images and decodes them with JS – but that’s slower.

Plus the bigger issue is adoption. You want all users to get your JPEG XL images, not just the 0.1% of users that installed the extension.

It can be, but not perfectly.

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jxl/?utm_sour...

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/add-jxl-support/kh...

Aside from JPEG 2000, which did in fact gain traction in a few verticals, the grandparent might have also confused it for JPEG-LS (1999), JPEG XR (2009), JPEG XT (2015), or JPEG XS (2019).

Honestly I think the biggest risk to adoption of JPEG XL might be this prior brand dilution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG#JPEG-LS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XS

(Facepalm) I was totally thinking of jpeg2000 not jpeg xl. That makes so much more sense!

> Is there a specific reason why this has to be a OS update thing?

The way Apple does it, it's cleaner to implement the APIs for this sort of thing in a new operating system version, especially if it requires features not present in the current versions of the operating system.

They could make an exception for Safari by including the required code to support JPEG XL in Safari Technology Preview on Ventura to allow developers to test their sites and web apps until macOS, iOS, etc. ship in the fall.

I suspect we'll learn what the plan is as the Safari/WebKit team make more announcements during WWDC: https://www.webkit.org/blog/14203/web-technology-sessions-at...

It doesn’t have to be, but Apple has generally deferred new functionality to major versions, especially since they moved to an annual release cadence. There have also been a few exceptions since then, but they’re usually headline features which were supposed to bolster the major release but fell behind schedule.

It doesn't have to be, but by making it an OS level thing, then when you download that photo, it still opens in Preview, etc.