Jpeg XL was going to be the future

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Some of you might not have heard of Jpeg XL, but I am sure you have heard of Jpeg. Jpeg XL is the successor to jpeg by a long shot.

Jpeg XL adds support for transparency in images that many liked from png images. It also adds support for lossy compression. It even adds support for HDR and animated images. This is the all-in-one jpeg, png, gif, and webp file format.

Jpeg XL can be 60% the size of a normal jpeg image for the same visual quality (lossy), and be 20% smaller than jpeg and 35% smaller than png with lossless.

You might be wondering how this holds up with AVIF. Jpeg XL is faster to encode and decode on both single- and multi-core systems; this is helpful for servers that want to do real-time image generation. Jpeg XL does have more support for "true color," while AVF does not have this support. The main thing people want to know is that AVIF does have better compression with lossy, where the image still looks sharp, while JPEG XL has more artifacts at low file sizes. With lossless compression, Jpeg XL beats AIFF.

You might be wondering why you have never interacted with this file type. That is because Google (Chromium) is preventing it from being pushed into Chrome without some special compile flags. If you want to see the whole discussion, here is a link to it: Chromium Issue 1178058: JPEG XL decoding support (image/jxl) in blink (tracking bug).

You can read the messages that people have been talking about, and not much of it will be negative; most people were agreeing that this should be inside chromium. The reasons stated above should give you an idea of what they were talking about and why they wanted this change.

Here are some companies or organizations that wanted this support:

I just want you to read that whole list of companies that said they wanted Jpeg XL and read this comment from Chromium on why they don't want to add Jpeg XL support: There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL.

If you didn't have a reason to switch away from a Chromium-based browser, now you do. We cannot allow Google to have this much control over the web that they can just say no to every other company just because they want it their way.