Chromium Has Merged JpegXL
chromium-review.googlesource.com

・

446 points

・

thunderbong

・

3 days ago

180 comments

out_of_protocol ・ 3 days ago

https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front

Oldie goodie article with charts, comparing webp, jpegxl, avif, jpeg etc. avif is SLOW

  • xnx ・ 3 days ago

    > This consolidates JPEG XL’s position as the best image codec currently available, for both lossless and lossy compression, across the quality range but in particular for high quality to visually lossless quality. It is Pareto-optimal across a wide range of speed settings.

    Wow. Nice. Big improvement if JPEG and PNG can be replaced by one codec.

    • lambdaone ・ 3 days ago

      And even better if someone can implement the whole massive spec securely...

      • JyrkiAlakuijala ・ 2 days ago

        Disclaimer: As a manager I led the JPEG XL design, implementation and standardization effort at Google, and as an IC I was responsible for lossy format, encoding heuristics and image quality.

        JPEG XL is not that massive.

        JPEG XL spec is slightly less than 100 pages, about half the size of the JPEG1 spec.

        A simple implementation in j40 was around 7000 lines of code last time I looked, not sure if it is 100 % complete however.

        A simple encoder at libjxl-tiny is of similar size and very attractive to be used for expressing similar coding decisions in hardware intended for digital cameras.

        A complex speed optimized C++ decoder implementation is ~35000 lines of code, but much of it is not due to the spec, but getting most out of SIMD-powered multi-core computers.

        The binary size increase in Chromium on arm for adding (in the past) the C++ decoder was around 200 kB in APK size, possibly around 0.1 %.

      • fsflover ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 17 more

        This is probably impossible and also not needed. Choose security through compartmentalization (instead of security through correctness that never works), if you really care about security.

        Works for me with Qubes OS.

        • itintheory ・ 3 days ago
          ・ 13 more

          Do you daily drive Qubes? I'd be curious to hear about your experiences. I've been following the project from the sidelines for years, but haven't taken the leap.

          • eptcyka ・ 2 days ago
            ・ 4 more

            Do you hate GPU acceleration? Do you hate using most hardware? Do you like using Xorg? Then Qubes is for you.

            This is in jest, but those are my pain points - the AMD thinkpad I have can't run it, the Intel one melts yubikeys when decoding h264 video. The default lock screen can't read capital letters from the yubikeys static password entry. Qubes has a certain user that it caters to, I really wish they could get enough money to be able to cater to more use cases. It is not difficult to use it if it works for you.

          • JCattheATM ・ 2 days ago
            ・ 7 more

            Just FYI, there are some people that vastly exaggerate the security it provides. For the most part, you're just as safe using flatpak versions of applications.

            • fsflover ・ 2 days ago
              ・ 6 more

              When was the last Flatpak escape? Last VM escape from VT-d virtualization, which Qubes uses by default, was found in 2006 by the Qubes founder, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(software)

              • JCattheATM ・ 2 days ago
                ・ 5 more

                The most recent VM escape from VT-d virtualization was in 2022[0].

                Escapes are not the only vulnerability. QSB-108 allows for reading the memory of other qubes running on the host[1].

                [0] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-15565

                [1] https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2025/07/11/qsb-108/

                • fsflover ・ 2 days ago
                  ・ 4 more

                  Apart from the fact that this is extremely rare, the first vulnerability is not a complete escape. For example, any offline vault VM storing secrets stayed secure. This is just not happening with any other security approach.

                  Speculative sidechannel attacks have nothing to do with OS or compartmentalization technology, since they are the problem of CPUs. Nothing can help here, so this is irrelevant to this discussion. Except that Qubes Air will save you in the future: https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2018/01/22/qubes-air/

                  • JCattheATM ・ 2 days ago
                    ・ 3 more

                    > Apart from the fact that this is extremely rare,

                    So are bubblewrap escapes, which is the sandbox flatpak uses.

                    > the first vulnerability is not a complete escape.

                    It could potentially lead to one, and being able to obtain information from other VMs defeats much of the point of isolation, and so defeats much of the point of why people use qubes.

                    > For example, any offline vault VM storing secrets stayed secure. This is just not happening with any other security approach.

                    That's not true. Strong MAC would suffice, no VT-d needed.

                    > Speculative sidechannel attacks have nothing to do with OS or compartmentalization technology

                    Of course they do, in fact they have more to do with it than solutions like flatpak, which is why Qubes releases security advisories and patches to address those vulnerabilities.

                    • fsflover ・ 14 hours ago
                      ・ 2 more

                      >> Apart from the fact that this is extremely rare,

                      > So are bubblewrap escapes, which is the sandbox flatpak uses.

                      Not only they are much more frequent, including possibly kernel privilege escalations, not affecting Qubes, - the bubblewrap repository itself says that you have to be really careful to stay secure with it, even in the lack of vulnerabilities. This is not what people should seriously rely on. Again, my secrets in vault VM are safe since the introduction of VT-d in Qubes 4.0 in ~2021. There is no comparably secure OS in the world.

                      I don't understand your unsubstantiated attack on Qubes.

                      > and being able to obtain information from other VMs defeats much of the point of isolation

                      It does not. Even if a VM becomes hostile and starts reading the RAM, it will not get any privileges in any other VM. Also, it can be easily cleaned. Also, you can just stop all VMs when performing a secure operation. Tell me how you protect yourself in such case with Flatpak.

                      • JCattheATM ・ 13 hours ago

                        > Not only they are much more frequent, including possibly kernel privilege escalations,

                        No, that's simply not the case.

                        > not affecting Qubes,

                        Maybe, qubese would still be vulnerable to kernel vulnerabilities even if they didn't allow VM escape - anything in the disposable VM would be at risk.

                        > the bubblewrap repository itself says that you have to be really careful to stay secure with it, even in the lack of vulnerabilities.

                        Source? I assume they are referring to misconfigurations.

                        > There is no comparably secure OS in the world.

                        You've said before you don't have a lot of security knowledge and it continues to show. Qubes is one specific approach to a problem not suitable for all goals, it's useful for hobbyists who use browsers and such. Anything in the disposable VM is still at risk.

                        SEL4, ASOS and CuBit are all more secure than Qubes. Qubes doesn't offer any more security than having a bunch of different machines to do different tasks on. Not even airgapped. If the machines have a vulnerability, then whatever is on the machine is fair game.

                        > I don't understand your unsubstantiated attack on Qubes.

                        There is no attack, I'm just refuting your preposterous zealotry for it. It's fine for what it is, but you make it much more than what it is. The developers of Qubes would absolutely disagree with your claims.

                        > Even if a VM becomes hostile and starts reading the RAM, it will not get any privileges in any other VM.

                        That depends entirely on the vulnerability.

        • lern_too_spel ・ 2 days ago
          ・ 3 more

          Qubes doesn't compartmentalize the image decoder in a web browser from the rest of the renderer, and if you're serving tracking pixels and can exploit image decoding, you can make serious mischief.

          • fsflover ・ 2 days ago
            ・ 2 more

            If you use Qubes correctly, then VM in which you go to untrusted websites is disposable and contains no personal information, so there is no mischief to make.

            • lern_too_spel ・ a day ago

              The web page you are visiting contains personal information, and that is where the mischief can be made. All that is required is for the website to incorrectly trust an image, either by not sanitizing a user-uploaded image or by embedding a third party image. Both trust bugs are rampant on the web, and both have caused problems in the past. Adding an improperly vetted image decoder is a sure-fire way to get exploit authors salivating.

    • adgjlsfhk1 ・ 3 days ago

      The part I'm more excited for is all the image-like/bundle of image like data that until Jpeg-xl didn't have any good codecs (usually implemented as folders of images). One clear example of this is PBR in blender and friends. (e.g. a combo of normal map, roughness, color, metalness etc)

      • aktau ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        This is new to me. Can you elaborate please? Perhaps a link to somewhere showcasing this (and contrasting this to other solutions).

        • adgjlsfhk1 ・ 2 days ago

          See https://devtalk.blender.org/t/jpeg-xl-as-an-intermediate-for.... TLDR is that one of the really interesting things JPEG-XL adds is the ability to have an arbitrary number of non-color channels. The current solution is generally to use separate grayscale images for each extra thing you want to store, which is inefficient since it loses the ability to compress the correlation between the separate channels. Another example usecase would be capturing images at 10 different wavelengths rather than the typical RGB.

    • hulitu ・ 2 days ago

      > Big improvement if JPEG and PNG can be replaced by one codec.

      By one ? Ten maybe: webp, avif, ...

  • smusamashah ・ 3 days ago

    JPEG at lowest quality looks much better here https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front#wha...

    • cfreksen ・ 3 days ago

      That means that SSIMULACRA2 does not capture quality perfectly.

      Note that in that figure the formats are compared at the same SSIMULACRA2 score, not at the same file size. In the "very low quality" category, JPEG uses ~0.4 bpp (bits per pixel), while JPEG-XL and AVIF use ~0.13 bpp and ~0.1 bpp, respectively, so JPEG is roughly given 4 times as much space to work with. In the "med-low quality" category, JPEG-XL and AVIF use around 0.4 bpp, so perhaps you should compare the "very low quality" JPEG with "med-low quality" JPEG-XL and AVIF.

      After reading your comment, I assumed you had missed the bpp difference. Please excuse me if I assumed incorrectly.

    • daemonologist ・ 3 days ago

      Keep in mind that lowest JPEG is 3-4x the size of the lowest JXL and AVIF - similar to the size of their "med-low" (top row).

  • lern_too_spel ・ 2 days ago

    Chromium is not using libjxl, which is the decoder that is evaluated in this article. The SVT encoder is much faster than the AOM encoder for AVIF.

  • charcircuit ・ 3 days ago

    This doesn't use hardware accelerated decoders and encoders.

adzm ・ 3 days ago

https://github.com/libjxl/jxl-rs jxl-rs is the underlying implementation. It's relatively new but Rust certainly calms security fears. This library wasn't really an option last time this came around in chromium.

  • quikoa ・ 3 days ago

    Didn't Google refuse adding JpegXL because they claimed there wasn't enough interest? I don't think they refused out of security concerns but maybe I'm misremembering that.

    • pixelesque ・ 3 days ago

      Google argued that duplicating largely (I know JpegXL does support a bit more, but from most users' perspectives, they're largely right) what AVIF provided while being written in an unsafe language was not what they wanted in terms in increasing the attack surface.

      • adzm ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 9 more

        And it really was the right move at the time, imo. JXL however now has better implementations and better momentum in the wider ecosystem and not just yet another image format that gets put into chrome and de facto becomes a standard.

        • _ache_ ・ 3 days ago
          ・ 3 more

          I can confirm. I found multiple problems in the "official" cjxl encoder back in 2023 contrary to the webp2 (cwp2) implementation where I could not find any bug or error.

          If the encoder have obvious problems it is not a big deal, but it doesn't bode well for the decoder.

          • adzm ・ 3 days ago
            ・ 2 more

            CVE-2023-0645 in libjxl that year too, and several since

            • rurban ・ 3 days ago

              It's also a horrible API. Will start working on the rust lib then. Hopefully it's better, because I really want to use it.

        • Dylan16807 ・ 3 days ago

          Forcing other companies to override them is a way to prove momentum but it's not a good way to prove momentum.

      • Dylan16807 ・ 3 days ago

        > duplicating largely what AVIF provided

        That's not a great bar since both of them showed up around the same time. And importantly JXL hits many use cases that AVIF doesn't.

        > while being written in an unsafe language

        They put little emphasis on that part when they were rejecting JXL. If they wanted to call for a safer implementation they could have done that.

    • gcr ・ 3 days ago

      Google refused to merge JpegXL as a strategy play to promote AVIF, which was in use by other teams (i think Photos?). Internally, chrome engineers were supportive of jxl but were overridden by leadership.

      • zaphar ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 9 more

        Do you have actual sources for this? Because the other people commenting about how the newer library removes most of the concerns explains this better than an unsubstantiated speculation about promoting AVIF.

        • themerone ・ 3 days ago
          ・ 6 more

          If you look at the issue tracker, the creator of Webp killed it because of untrue claims there was no interest or advantages over existing formats.

          Concerns about the implementation only came up after years of pushback forced google ton reconsider.

          • magicalist ・ 3 days ago
            ・ 5 more

            > If you look at the issue tracker, the creator of Webp killed it because of untrue claims

            I think for most modern software it's difficult to name the creator, but if you had to for webp, it would be hard to argue that it's anyone but Jyrki Alakuijala, who is in fact one of the co-creators of jpegxl and the person backing up the long-term support of the rust jxl-rs implementation, so I'm not even going to ask for a source here because it's just not true.

            • brigade ・ 3 days ago
              ・ 2 more

              AFAIK Jyrki came after WebP was already announced to add lossless support; rather I’d consider Skal the creator inasmuch as it was originally just an image container for VP8 intra. He was working on WebP2 at the time Google rejected JPEG-XL and also was not involved in that decision.

              • JyrkiAlakuijala ・ 2 days ago

                I designed the lossless format and its initial encoder. Zoltán Szabadka wrote the initial lossless decoder.

                On2 Technologies had designed the lossy format and its initial encoder/decoder. Skal improved on the encoder (rewriting it for better quality, inventing workarounds for the YUV420 sampling quality issues), but did not change the format's image-related aspects that On2 Technologies had come up with for VP8 video use.

                In the end stage of lossless productization (around February 2012) Skal had minor impact on the lossless format:

                1. He asked it to have the same size limitations (16383x16383 pixels) like lossy.

                2. He wanted to remove some expressivity for easier time for hardware implementations, perhaps a 0.5 % hit on density.

                Skal also took care of integrating the lossless format into the lossy as an alpha layer.

            • ksec ・ 2 days ago

              >so I'm not even going to ask for a source here because it's just not true.

              Well it is up to you to decide. The link was submitted a dozen of times on HN and the whole thing was well reported. And Jyrki Alakuijala already classify its creator status.

            • themerone ・ 3 days ago

              It's been 3 years, I might have people mixed up, but that was the justification at the time.

        • ksec ・ 2 days ago

          >an unsubstantiated speculation about promoting AVIF.

          They deliberately made up a flawed test to show AVIF is better than JPEG XL. When most evidences shows contrary.

        • gsich ・ 3 days ago

          Bug tracker where they lied about "not enough interest".

  • rafram ・ 3 days ago

    > It's relatively new but Rust certainly calms security fears.

    https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Alibjxl%2Fjxl-rs%20unsafe&...

    • dubi_steinkek ・ 3 days ago

      That looks pretty good to me. Every `unsafe` function has clearly stated safety requirements, and every `unsafe` blocks justifies why the requirements are met.

    • 12_throw_away ・ 3 days ago

      So, I had no reason to use "unsafe" for a very long time, and had developed a bit of an aversion to it. Then I actually needed to use it, first to interface with some C code, and then to deal with a device's mmap'd memory as raw `&[u8]`s.

      And my discovery (which basically anyone could have told me beforehand) was that ... "unsafe" rust is not really that different from regular rust. It lets you dereference pointers (which is not a particularly unusual operation in many other languages) and call some functions that need extra care. Usually the presence of "unsafe" really just means that you needed to interface with foreign functions or hardware or something.

      This is all to say: implying that mere presence of an "unsafe" keyword is a sign that code is insecure is very, very silly.

  • WhereIsTheTruth ・ 3 days ago

    > Rust certainly calms security fears

    No, memory safety is not security, Rust's memory guarantees eliminate some issues, but they also create a dangerous overconfidence, devs treat the compiler as a security audit and skip the hard work of threat modeling

    A vigilant C programmer who manually validates everything and use available tools at its disposal is less risky than a complacent Rust programmer who blindly trust the language

    • rkangel ・ 3 days ago

      > A vigilant C programmer who manually validates everything and use available tools at its disposal is less risky than a complacent Rust programmer who blindly trust the language

      I agree with this. But for a component whose job is to parse data and produce pixels, the security worries I have are memory ones. It's not implementing a permissions model or anything where design and logic are really important. The security holes an image codec would introduce are the sort where it a buffer overun gave an execution primitive (etc.).

      • lambdaone ・ 3 days ago

        Rust programmers are far more likely to have the vigilant mindset than C programmers, or they wouldn't be using Rust.

        You can get an awful lot done very quickly in C if you aren't bothered about security - and traditionally, most of the profession has done exactly that.

    • estebank ・ 3 days ago

      > A vigilant C programmer who manually validates everything and use available tools at its disposal is less risky than a complacent Rust programmer who blindly trust the language

      What about against a vigilant Rust programmer who also manually validates everything and uses available tools at its disposal?

    • whatevaa ・ 3 days ago

      History shows that either vigilance of most C programmers is not enough, or they are not vigilant at all. C/C++ and RCE via some buffer overflow is like synonyms.

    • cyberax ・ 3 days ago

      > A vigilant C programmer who manually validates everything

      So, a fairy-tale character?

    • g947o ・ 2 days ago

      I can't believe someone is still using this argument. Is this sarcasm?

LtdJorge ・ 3 days ago

I’ve recently compared WebP and AVIF with the reference encoders (and rav1e for lossy AVIF), and for similar quality, WebP is almost instant while AVIF takes more than 20 seconds (1MP image).

JXL is not yet widely supported, so I cannot really use it (videogame maps), but I hope its performance is similar to WebP with better quality, for the future.

  • adzm ・ 3 days ago

    You have to adjust the CPU used parameter, not just quality, for AVIF. Though it can indeed be slow it should not be that slow, especially for a 1mp image. The defaults usually use a higher CPU setting for some reason. I have modest infrastructure that generates 2MP AVIF in a hundred ms or so.

    • LtdJorge ・ 3 days ago

      I tested both WebP and AVIF with maximum CPU usage/effort. I have not tried the faster settings because I wanted the highest quality for small size, but for similar quality WebP blew AVIF out of the water.

      I also have both compiled with -O3 and -march=znver2 in GCC (same for rav1e's RUSTFLAGS) through my Gentoo profile.

      • adzm ・ 3 days ago

        Maximum CPU between those two libs is not really comparable though. But quality is subjective and it sounds like webp worked best for you! Just saying though, there is little benefit in using the max CPU settings for avif. That's like comparing max CPU settings on zip vs xz!

  • fishgoesblub ・ 3 days ago

    rav1e has not had an actual update in performance or quality in years since funding got dropped. Use an encoder like aom, or svt-av1.

  • spartanatreyu ・ 2 days ago

    Other comments here are good, but one thing that's worth pointing out:

    Encoding time isn't as important as decoding time since encoding is generally a once-off operation.

    Yeah, we all want faster encodes, but the decodes are the most important part (especially in the web domain).

bla3 ・ 3 days ago

It's a shame that JpegXL doesn't have a freely available spec.

  • master-lincoln ・ 3 days ago

    You could also say it's a sham to have non-public standards

  • ksec ・ 2 days ago

    IIRC it doesn't have a freely available "Final" spec. The Final Draft is available for free.

  • Latitude7973 ・ 3 days ago

    In general terms, it is a shame that thousands of ISO, IEC etc specifications and documents are behind a paywall.

    • nathancahill ・ 3 days ago

      I'm surprised there hasn't been a Z-Lib/Anna's like movement for spec documents. Given how tech savvy the default audience of those documents are.

      • account42 ・ 2 days ago

        For many relevant specs you can find "draft versions" that are essentially the final version without the official stamp on the open web so there isn't that much of a need.

      • OneDeuxTriSeiGo ・ 3 days ago

        I mean anna's have most specs and if you know where to look there are IPFS and torrent sources for large portions of entire spec libraries.

    • bionhoward ・ 3 days ago

      Yes! The paywalled SQL documents are a big annoyance

Findecanor ・ 3 days ago

From my (limited) understanding, there is still a lot shared between JPEG and JPEG-XL.

I wonder if this new implementation could be extended to incorporate support for the older JPEG format and if then total code size could be reduced.

hbn ・ 3 days ago

So is this another image format I'll download and be unable to use without converting because nothing supports it a la .webp?

  • llm_nerd ・ 3 days ago

    What do you think doesn't support it?

    Affinity supports it. Photoshop supports it. Microsoft Photos supports it. Gimp supports it. Apple has had systemwide support for it since iOS 17+ / macOS 12+, including in Safari and basically any app that uses the system image functions.

    Chromium isn't on the bleeding edge here. They actually were when it first came out, but then retreated and waited, and now they're back again.

    • jiggawatts ・ 3 days ago

      Half the point of JPEG XL is support for HDR and higher than 8 bits per channel. Most of the apps you listed don’t support that fully, especially iOS, which converts everything to SDR or shows garbage — except for their own proprietary gain map encoding that their camera app produces.

      • jama_ ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 4 more

        Actually, in my recent vibe coding adventures I tested making a ProRAW converter app that also applied the included gain map to the image and encoded via libjxl on device. Surprisingly, Photos.app was able to display the converted image with HDR, but the HDR tag in the UI is only displayed for images with the proprietary gain map.

        There seems to be some support there, though I tested on iOS 26.

        • jiggawatts ・ 2 days ago
          ・ 3 more

          Yes, but you can't send that to anyone via iMessage. It corrupts the image.

          • jama_ ・ 2 days ago
            ・ 2 more

            That I of course didn't test. Yeah, I'd expect them reencoding images to save on bandwidth, and they're probably doing so naively for JXL (maybe even converting to HEIC).

            • jiggawatts ・ 2 days ago

              > That I of course didn't test.

              Neither did Apple, which is the problem!

    • aniviacat ・ 3 days ago

      Lots of stuft still doesn't support it, for example WhatsApp and Discord.

      WhatsApp doesn't even support WebP though. Hopefully, if they ever get around to adding WebP, they'll throw JXL in, too.

      • nekiwo ・ 2 days ago

        Discord certainly supports it (on web and desktop client). I've been able to upload high resolution WebP images for at least a year now.

  • thunderfork ・ 3 days ago

    Yes, just like any new format, there's going to be an adoption period of about a decade before it reaches "ubiquitous-enough" support.

  • account42 ・ 2 days ago

    Use better software - ideally open source software so that in the worst case you can just add support yourself.

jakkos ・ 3 days ago

I've been hearing about fights over JpegXL and WebP (and AVIF?) for years, but don't know much about it.

From a quick look at various "benchmarks" JpegXL seems just be flat out better than WebP in both compression speed and size, why has there been such reluctance from Chromium to adopt it? Are there WebP benefits I'm missing?

My only experience with WebP has been downloading what is nominally a `.png` file but then being told "WebP is not supported" by some software when I try to open it.

  • jmillikin ・ 3 days ago

    Most of the code in WebP and AVIF is shared with VP8/AV1, which means if your browser supports contemporary video codecs then it also gets pretty good lossy image codecs for free. JPEG-XL is a separate codebase, so it's far more effort to implement and merely providing better compression might not be worth it absent other considerations. The continued widespread use of JPEG is evidence that many web publishers don't care that much about squeezing out a few bytes.

    Also from a security perspective the reference implementation of JPEG-XL isn't great. It's over a hundred kLoC of C++, and given the public support for memory safety by both Google and Mozilla it would be extremely embarrassing if a security vulnerability in libjxl lead to a zero-click zero-day in either Chrome or Firefox.

    The timing is probably a sign that Chrome considers the Rust implementation of JPEG-XL to be mature enough (or at least heading in that direction) to start kicking the tires.

    • latexr ・ 3 days ago

      > The continued widespread use of JPEG is evidence that many web publishers don't care that much about squeezing out a few bytes.

      I agree with the second part (useless hero images at the top of every post demonstrate it), but not necessarily the first. JPEG is supported pretty much everywhere images are, and it’s the de facto default format for pictures. Most people won’t even know what format they’re using, let alone that they could compress it or use another one. In the words of Hank Hill:

      > Do I look like I know what a JPEG is? I just want a picture of a god dang hot dog.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvKTOHVGNbg

      • jmillikin ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        I'm not (only) talking about the general population, but major sites. As a quick sanity check, the following sites are serving images with the `image/jpeg` content type:

        * CNN (cnn.com): News-related photos on their front page

        * Reddit (www.reddit.com): User-provided images uploaded to their internal image hosting

        * Amazon (amazon.com): Product categories on the front page (product images are in WebP)

        I wouldn't expect to see a lot of WebP on personal homepages or old-style forums, but if bandwidth costs were a meaningful budget line item then I would expect to see ~100% adoption of WebP or AVIF for any image that gets recompressed by a publishing pipeline.

        • vlovich123 ・ 3 days ago

          It’s subsidized by cheap CDN rates and dominated by video demand.

        • ascorbic ・ 3 days ago

          Any site that uses a frontend framework or CMS will probably serve WebP at the very least.

  • jacobp100 ・ 3 days ago

    JpegXL and AVIF are comparable formats. Google argued you only needed one, and each additional format is a security vulnerability.

    • londons_explore ・ 3 days ago

      And more importantly, an additional format is a commitment to maintain support forever, not only for you, but for future people who implement a web browser.

      I can completely see why the default answer to "should we add x" should be no unless there is a really good reason.

  • out_of_protocol ・ 3 days ago

    - avif is better at low bpp (low-quality images), terrible in lossless

    - jxl is better at high bpp, best in lossless mode

  • speps ・ 3 days ago

    It was an issue with the main JPEGXL library being unmaintained and possibly open for security flaws. Some people got together and wrote a new one in Rust which then became an acceptable choice for a secure browser.

    • a-french-anon ・ 3 days ago

      Unmaintained? You must be mistaken, libjxl was getting a healthy stream of commits.

      The issue was the use of C++ instead of Rust or WUFFS (that Chromium uses for a lot of formats).

    • spider-mario ・ 3 days ago

      It’s largely the same people.

  • rdsubhas ・ 3 days ago

    > various "benchmarks" JpegXL seems just be flat out better than WebP

    The decode speed benchmarks are misleading. WebP has been hardware accelerated since 2013 in Android and 2020 in Apple devices. Due to existing hardware capabilities, real users will _always_ experience better performance and battery life with webp.

    JXL is more about future-proofing. Bit depth, Wide gamut HDR, Progressive decoding, Animation, Transparency, etc.

    JXL does flat out beats AVIF (the image codec, not videos) today. AVIF also pretty much doesn't have hardware decoding in modern phones yet. It makes sense to invest NOW in JXL than on AVIF.

    For what people use today - unfortunately there is no significant case to beat WebP with the existing momentum. The size vs perceptive quality tradeoffs are not significantly different. For users, things will get worse (worser decode speeds & battery life due to lack of hardware decode) before it gets better. That can take many years – because hey, more features in JXL also means translating that to hardware die space will take more time. Just the software side of things is only now picking up.

    But for what we all need – it's really necessary to start the JXL journey now.

    • Dylan16807 ・ 3 days ago

      > Due to existing hardware capabilities, real users will _always_ experience better performance and battery life with webp.

      Extra data transfer costs performance and battery life too.

    • chocolatkey ・ 3 days ago

      Where can I learn more about hardware acceleration of WebP on mobile OSes? I haven’t yet come across a resource that confirms this is actually the case. I know it should theoretically be possible using the VP8 hardware decoders but I thought those were expensive to warm up just for images

  • 3OCSzk ・ 3 days ago

    1 black pixel of .webp is smaller than 1 black pixel of .jpegxl that is also smaller than 1 black pixel of .png

    so webp > jpegxl > png

  • archerx ・ 3 days ago

    Google created webp and that is why they are giving it unjustified preferential treatment and has been trying to unreasonably force it down the throat of the internet.

    • adzm ・ 3 days ago

      WebP gave me alpha transparency with lossy images, which came in handy at the time. It was also not bogged down by patents and licensing. Plus like others said, if you support vp8 video, you pretty much already have a webp codec, same with AV1 and avif

      • archerx ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 7 more

        Lossy PNGs exist with transparency.

        • WhitneyLand ・ 3 days ago

          PNG as a format is not lossy, it uses deflate.

          What you’re referring to is pngquant which uses dithering/reduces colors to allow the PNG to compress to a smaller size.

          So the “loss” is happening independent of the format.

        • adzm ・ 3 days ago
          ・ 5 more

          Do you mean lossless? PNGs are not lossy. A large photo with alpha channel in a lossless png could easily be 20x the size of a lossy webp

          • Semaphor ・ 3 days ago

            PNG of course can be lossy. They aren’t great at it, but depending on the image can be good enough.

          • archerx ・ 3 days ago
            ・ 3 more

            No I meant lossy. This is the library I use; https://pngquant.org/

            • thunderfork ・ 3 days ago
              ・ 2 more

              Pre-processing does not a codec make (this is why .gif is considered lossless even though you lose all that 24-bit colour goodness)

              • archerx ・ 3 days ago

                Fair enough but it gets the job done well none the less.

    • breppp ・ 3 days ago

      unjustified preferential treatment over jpegxl a format google also had created

      • archerx ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 6 more

        They helped create jpegXL but they are not the sole owner like they are with webp. There is a difference.

        • breppp ・ 3 days ago
          ・ 5 more

          a better argument might be that chrome protects their own vs a research group in google switzerland, however as other mentioned the security implications of another unsafe binary parser in a browser is hardly worth it

          • archerx ・ 3 days ago
            ・ 4 more

            Webp has had major vulnerabilities.

            https://blog.cloudflare.com/uncovering-the-hidden-webp-vulne...

            • breppp ・ 3 days ago
              ・ 3 more

              which only strengthens my argument, webp seemed like some ad-hoc pet project in chrome, and that ended like most unsafe binary parsers, with critical vulnerabilities

              • magicalist ・ 3 days ago
                ・ 2 more

                > webp seemed like some ad-hoc pet project in chrome

                FWIW webp came from the same "research group in google switzerland" that later developed jpegxl.

                • breppp ・ 3 days ago

                  I now see that webp lossless is definitely from there, but the webp base format looks acquired from a US startup, was the image format also adapted in the swiss group?

    • MrDOS ・ 3 days ago

      You're getting downvoted, but you're not wrong. If anyone else had come up with it, it would have been ignored completely. I don't think it's as bad as some people make it out to be, but it's not really that compelling for end users, either. As other folks in the thread have pointed out, WebP is basically the static image format that you get “for free” when you've already got a VP8 video decoder.

      The funny thing is all the places where Google's own ecosystem has ignored WebP. E.g., the golang stdlib has a WebP decoder, but all of the encoders you'll find are CGo bindings to libwebp.

      • archerx ・ 3 days ago

        I noticed Hacker news is more about feelings than facts lately which is a shame.

Mr_Minderbinder ・ 2 days ago

Why does the current design paradigm in image coding formats emphasise supporting as many features as possible in order to have “one image format to rule them all”? You do not see this in audio and does anybody think that Opus and FLAC should be combined into one format? Does the fact that Opus does not support lossless encoding make it worse?

  • upbeat_general ・ a day ago

    From a user perspective it is nice to know that the person decoding will likely support a given format, both now and in the future.

    More use cases for a single popular format makes this more likely.

carra ・ 3 days ago

Thanks, but just like WEBP I'll try to stick to regular JPEGs whenever possible. Not all programs I use accept these formats, and for a common user JPEG + PNG should mostly cover all needs. Maybe add GIF to the list for simple animations, while more complex ones can be videos instead of images.

  • Sammi ・ 3 days ago

    You can really treat WebP as a universally available format in 2026. It is an old, boring, and safe format to use now.

    Browser support for WebP is excellent now. The last browser to add it was Safari 14 in September 16, 2020: https://caniuse.com/webp

    It got into Windows 10 1809 in October 2018. Into MacOS Big Sur in November 2020.

    Wikipedia has a great list of popular software that supports it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP#Graphics_software

    • carra ・ 3 days ago

      Unfortunately being universal implies way more than just having good browser support. There are quite a few image processing programs without webp or jpeg-xl support. I'm using Windows 11 and the default image viewer can't even open webp... Also, keep in mind that due to subscription models there are many people stuck with older Photoshop versions too.

      • spider-mario ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        You just need this: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pg2dk419drg

        • carra ・ 3 days ago

          Thanks, I know about this and other workarounds. My point is, if it was truly universal you should not need anything! I bet most regular users will never even know this exists.

        • majora2007 ・ 3 days ago

          I never knew about this either and it's been very frustrating as I've been converting my Manga library over to webp (savings are insane) and doing any spot checking opens Edge.

          Edit: After reading the comments, this doesn't seem to open in Photos App.

    • Y-bar ・ 3 days ago

      Webp can be really annoying once you hit certain encoding edge cases.

      One customer of mine (fashion) has over 700k images in their DAM, and about 0.5% cannot be converted to webp at all using libwebp. They can without problem be converted to jpeg, png, and avif.

      • jdiff ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 5 more

        Just out of curiosity, what's the problem libwebp has with them? I wasn't aware of cases where any image format would just cross its arms and refuse point blank like that.

        • Y-bar ・ 3 days ago
          ・ 3 more

          We have never been able to resolve it better than knowing this:

          Certain pixel colour combinations in the source image appear to trip the algorithm to such a degree that the encoder will only produce a black image.

          We know this because we have been able to encode the images by (in pure frustration) manually brute forcing moving a black square across the source image on different locations and then trying to encode again. Suddenly it will work.

          Images are pretty much always exported from Adobe, often smaller than 3000x3000 pixels. Images from the same camera, same size, same photo session, same export batch will work and then suddenly one out of a few hundred may become black, and only the webp one not other formats, the rest of the photos will work for all formats.

          A more mathematically inclined colleague tried to have a look at the implementation once, but was unable to figure it out because they could apparently not find a good written spec on how the encoder is supposed to work.

          • SahAssar ・ 2 days ago
            ・ 2 more

            Have you reported this bug? It sounds interesting what the authors would say.

            • Y-bar ・ 2 days ago

              No. Our experience with reporting issues in Skia and other such Google libraries has left a bitter impression, so we simply avoid it.

  • striking ・ 3 days ago

    "JPEG XL" is a little bit of a misnomer as it's not just "JPEG with more bits". It supports lossless encoding of existing content at a smaller file size than PNG and allows you to transcode existing JPEGs recoverably for a 20% space savings, the lossy encoding doesn't look nearly as ugly and artifacted as JPEG, it supports wide gamut and HDR, and delivers images progressively so you get a decent preview with as little as 15% of the image loaded with no additional client-side effort (from https://jpegxl.info/).

    It is at least a very good transcoding target for the web, but it genuinely replaces many other formats in a way where the original source file can more or less be regenerated.

    • AlienRobot ・ 3 days ago

      Honestly, I don't like how webp and now jpegxl support both a lossless and lossy mode.

      Let's say you want to store images lossless. This means you won't tolerate loss of data. Which means you don't want to risk it by using a codec that will compress the image lossy if you forget to enable a setting.

      With PNG there is no way to accidentally make it lossy, which feels a lot safer for cases you want lossless compression.

      • jonsneyers ・ 2 days ago

        PNG can and is often used in a lossy way. Reducing the number of colors so PNG8 can be used instead of PNG24/PNG32 is the most common way to do that. Tools like pngquant exist, and for example Photoshop when exporting to PNG also has an option to reduce the colors, to flatten the image (remove alpha), or to change the colorspace.

        16-bit PNG files can easily accidentally be reduced to 8-bit, which is of course a lossy operation. Animated PNG files can easily get converted into a still image (keeping only the first frame). CMYK images will have to be converted to RGB when saving them as PNG, which is also a lossy operation. It can happen that an image gets created as or converted to JPEG and then gets saved as PNG - which of course is a bad and lossy workflow, but it does happen.

        So I don't agree that with PNG there is no way to accidentally make it lossy.

        In any case: lossless or lossy is not a property of a format, but of a workflow. For keeping track of provenance information and workflow history, I would recommend looking into JPEG Trust / C2PA, which is a way to embed as metadata what happened to an image since it was captured/generated. Relying on the choice of image format for this is fragile and doesn't allow expressing the nuances, since reality is more complicated than just a binary "lossless or lossy".

      • repiret ・ 3 days ago

        You can use too few bits of color depth to get lossyness in PNG. More generally, I can't find myself very sympathetic to "I don't want a format that can do X and Y, because I might accidentally select X when I want Y in my software". You might accidentally choose JPG when you want PNG too. Or accidentally resample the image. Or delete your files.

        If you want a robust lossless workflow, PNG isn't the answer. Automating the fiddly parts and validating that the automation does what you want is the answer.

      • striking ・ 3 days ago

        Taking a look at the reference codec package at https://gitlab.com/wg1/jpeg-xl, they note:

        > Specifically for JPEG files, the default cjxl behavior is to apply lossless recompression and the default djxl behavior is to reconstruct the original JPEG file (when the extension of the output file is .jpg).

        You're right, however, that you do need to be careful and use the reference codec package for this, as tools like ImageMagick create loss during the decoding of the JPEG into pixels (https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/discussions/6046) and ImageMagick sets quality to 92 by default. But perhaps that's something we can change.

  • ashirviskas ・ 3 days ago

    You should never use GIF anymore, it is super inefficient. Just do video, it is 5x to 10x more efficient.

    https://web.dev/articles/replace-gifs-with-videos

    • jdiff ・ 3 days ago

      There's odd cases where it still has uses. When I was a teacher, some of the gamifying tools don't allow video embeds without a subscription, but I wanted to make some "what 3D operation is shown here" questions with various tools in Blender. GIF sizes were pretty comparable to video with largely static, less-than-a-second loops, and likely had slightly higher quality with care used to reduce color palette usage.

      But I fully realize, there are vanishingly few cases with similar constraints.

      • ascorbic ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 4 more

        For those you can often use animated WebP, or even APNG. They all have close to universal support and are usually much smaller.

        • tylertyler ・ 3 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          If you need animated images in emails or text messages, GIF is the only supported format that will play the animation. Because of the size restrictions for these messaging systems the inefficient compression of GIFs is a major issue.

          • prmoustache ・ 3 days ago

            I am not sure "need" is the right word here.

        • adzm ・ 3 days ago

          AVIF works here also. Discord started supporting it for custom emoji.

    • SahAssar ・ 2 days ago

      Videos and images are treated very differently by browsers and OS:es. I'm guessing the better suggestion would be to use apng or animated avif if you are looking for a proper gif alternative.

      • account42 ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 4 more

        Do browsers support progressive enhancement from gif to animated avif without javascript? The royally messed that up for animated webp.

        • SahAssar ・ 2 days ago
          ・ 3 more

          Yes, by using the <picture> element with <source> elements declaring the individual formats with the last one being a regular <img> with the gif.

          Or you could use content-negotiation to only send avif when it's supported, but IMO the HTML way with <picture> is perhaps clearer for the client and end user.

          I think the webp problem was due to browsers supporting webp but not supporting animation, transparency or other features, so content negotiation based on mime types (either via <picture> or HTTP content-negotiation) did not work properly. Safari 16.1-16.3 has the same problem with AVIF, but that is a smaller problem than it was with webp.

          • account42 ・ a day ago
            ・ 2 more

            So I guess that's a no - avif support does not necessarily mean animated avif support.

            • SahAssar ・ 16 hours ago

              I covered this in my comment:

              > Safari 16.1-16.3 has the same problem with AVIF, but that is a smaller problem than it was with webp.

    • account42 ・ 2 days ago

      Unfortunately browser vendors didn't want to support silent looping videos in <img> tags so gif stays relevant.

    • gsich ・ 2 days ago

      only if looping information is stored inside the container.

RobotToaster ・ 3 days ago

Reading the feature list of JpegXL on Wiki, it includes some interesting stuff like arbitrary numbers of channels for multi-spectral imaging and multi page documents, which for both better and worse starts to sound a lot like TIFF.

viktorcode ・ 3 days ago

Anyone knows if their implementation supports animations? This is a feature missing from Apple's

  • adzm ・ 3 days ago

    According to the chrome platform status page, yes! https://chromestatus.com/feature/5114042131808256

    >>>

      - Progressive decoding for improved perceived loading performance
  - Support for wide color gamut, HDR, and high bit depth
  - Animation support
  • Latitude7973 ・ 3 days ago

    Yes, but it's not recommended - it does not have inter-frame compression, so it is significantly less efficient than just having a regular video file and slapping 'gif' on it.

    • ignaloidas ・ 2 days ago

      That's not strictly correct, it's rather that the current encoder does no inter-frame compression. Patches (and the frame system in general) does give tools to do some inter-frame compression (not as many as in video, but still quite expressive), just nobody stepped up to implement compression using them for animations yet.

    • account42 ・ 2 days ago

      Video files are not supported in <img> tags.

    • 112233 ・ 3 days ago

      Do you know of a video format that supports progressive decoding?

      • adgjlsfhk1 ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        Progressive decoding isn't a very useful video feature because you need to decode the whole frame before you decode the next frame for inter-frame coding methods anyway.

        • 112233 ・ 3 days ago

          It is, however, a very useful image format feature, giving you most information from the spinner/sticker/emoji/sprite, and refinig the already playing loop as it loads. That's why animated jxl is a bad video format — it's not a video format, it is a separate kind of seemingly weird thing.

  • nar001 ・ 3 days ago

    It does, I just tried it in Canary and the jxl test page did also show animations

  • actionfromafar ・ 3 days ago

    What, isn't this the cue for someone to explain that it's ironic webp is really a video format which is a bad image format, and now we have symmetry that JpegXL is a good image format which is bad video format? :-D

    (I don't know if any of this is true, but it sounds funny...)

    • account42 ・ 2 days ago

      Webp is also an incredibly bad animation format since it drops most of the inter-frame compression features of the video codec it was derived from.

einpoklum ・ 3 days ago

Unfortunately, with Chromium dropping support for manifest-v2 extensions, and through that dropping proper support for uBlock Origin, I'm moving away from it. Not that that's easy, of course...

  • YmiYugy ・ 3 days ago

    With Chrome being by far the most popular browser, it gaining support is almost a precondition for jxl gaining traction on the web. Few would bother converting their images for Safari (and when it becomes enabled without a flag Firefox). So this is good news even for people who don't use Chromium.