On the other hand there is something that seems almost infantile about image support in the "operating system" being pivotal. If you read a review of a new MacOS in ArsTechnica you might get the idea that 99% of an OS is about what the buttons look like but in terms of the computer science definition, 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.
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".
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)
Any comparision photos out there?
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...
- Better compression ratios
- Ability to modify effort of lossless compression (good for real time transcoding)
- Multi-threaded encode and decode
- Far superior progressive decoding (great for low bandwidth scenarios, just stream in the lossless quality over time)
If things with Apple go well and JPEG XL is supported natively on macOS, iOS and iPadOS this fall, it would be on its way to becoming a thing.
After all, 2 billion devices isn't nothin’.
I take this to suggest that Chrome actively decided against implementing JPEG XL? Did they consider supporting it and reject support for it, or has it simply not been prioritized, but still might be prioritized one day?
If the decision was intentional: did they state a reason why?
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...
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.
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
Discussed several times previously on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35589179
Yes It was intentional.
They stated AVIF is as good if not better than JPEG XL.
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.
(I didn't downvote, BTW; it's a reasonable question.)
Learn about the latest image formats and video technologies supported in Safari 17. Discover how you can use JPEG XL, AVIF, and HEIC in your websites and experiences and learn how they differ from previous formats. We’ll also show you how the Managed Media Source API draws less power than Media Source Extensions (MSE) and explore how you can use it to more efficiently manage streaming video over 5G.
The link isn't live yet as the session is scheduled for Thursday, June 8th.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10122/
Just the JPEG recompression is arguably worth the price of entry; it's less savings than AVIF, of course, but it's easier to adopt now, where re-encoding everything as AVIF is a much larger hump to get over. Its other modes provide some real benefits for users for very-high-quality and lossless images as well as any situation where progressive display helps. For folks producing images, is much easier to fit in than AVIF for anyone who needs to encode a lot on the CPU.
I'm pretty sure the Chrome team knew at the time they dropped JPEG XL that there was a decent chance Apple would implement it--there's certainly enough of a backchannel between the browser teams at Google, Apple, Mozilla and Microsoft.
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.
Your move, Google.
WebP isn't good enough. AVIF isn't good enough. JPEG XL is good enough.
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.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jxl/?utm_sour...
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/add-jxl-support/kh...
I see the HDR mentioned in other comments which is interesting.
Are there any (potential conspiracy) reasons they would choose not to go for another format?
I'm trying to understand how they arrived at this answer given it was available for years and ignored in popular software.
Adobe has partial support (in Camera RAW) with presumably further support coming considering their website recommends JXL alongside AVIF for HDR images. It's also supported by Affinity Photo 2, Krita, Darkroom, GIMP, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, Paint.net, anything Qt/KDE-based via plugin, Pale Moon, libvips, and almost every third-party image viewer that I've ever used or heard of (nomacs, Irfanview, ImageGlass, xnView, etc.). It also has had vocal support from senior engineers at a variety of companies like Facebook, Shopify, Cloudinary, Intel, Flickr, etc.
My first thought when I heard about JXL several months ago was "oh, a new JPEG-2000?" but I've quickly become a JXL evangelist after reading more about it and then playing around with libjxl myself.
https://jpegxl.info/why-jxl.html
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
Also AVIF and HEIC as specified don't support >8k images.
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...