What's up with this? What is their motivation?
- 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
It's nonsense -- how can they claim "not enough interest" when we can't enable the feature on a public website (our visitors won't be able to see images).
That doesn't seem like a lot of interest as far as anyone can tell. The main interest has been from Facebook and Adobe, afaik.
If it's wrong it can be redone later. It isn't a blood oath never to reimplement it.
The way this gets fixed for real, at least to me, is to get mozilla/apple to have skin in the game.
As for killing the format - Google maintains libjxl, the jpeg-xl reference impl, and has for years.
But like, if the people maintaining the reference impl for years really want to kill the format, maybe we should at least understand why? They've been in the thick of it, after all.
Controlling an image format is basically worthless for a company like Google. Especially since they are always royalty free so far.
The cost to Google in bandwidth/storage/etc of images is much greater than than they could ever make off control.
(Unlike, say, Adobe or someone)
There are two reasons why you would use a higher compressing image format.
(1) To save network bandwidth, (2) to save storage.
Adding AVIF, WebP, and JPEG XL to a JPG file help with (1). To help with (2) you have to be able to replace the JPG with something new. Supporting more than one new file format is counterproductive.
It took me years to decide WebP was well-supported enough to be worth using but until very recently it still got a major caveat
that "Safari 14.0 – 15.6 has full support of WebP, but requires macOS 11 Big Sur or later."
With new image formats Apple decides it is a reason why you should buy a new machine and decides not to add a decoder to the library that works with older processors.
Ecosystem doesn't mean a few fans on HN, in this context they mean "people building browsers".