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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

I have no love for Google, at all.

It's really hard to say this in public, because people are treating it like a divisive "us or them" issue that's obvious, but the JPEG-XL stuff is _weird_.

I've been in codecs for 15 years, and have never seen as unconstructive behavior like the JPEG-XL work. If I had infinite time and money and it came across my plate, we'd have a year or two of constructive work to do, so we didn't just rush something in with obvious issues and opportunities.

It turned into "just figure out how to merge it in, and if you don't like it, that's malfeasance!" Bread and circus for commentators, maybe, but, actively preventing even foundational elements of a successful effort.

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To be honest, at Google scale, if there's an objectively good new codec with some early signs of excitement and plausible industry traction, and even Apple managed to deploy it to virtually all of their devices (and Apple isn't exactly known as an "open codec forward" company), not integrating it does seem like either malfeasance or gross organizational dysfunction to me.

Completely hypothetical scenario: what if the technical reaction was so hostile they invested in it themselves to fix the issues and make it sustainable?

In light of the recent security incident, I'd see that completely hypothetical situation as more admirable.

Hm, are you suggesting they're currently in the process of reimplementing it in a safer and/or more maintainable way as part of Chrome?

In that case, that would just be extremely bad messaging (which I also wouldn't put past Google). Why agitate half of the people on here and in other tech-affine parts of the Internet when they could have just publicly stated that they're working on it and to please have some patience?

Public support by Google, even if it's just in the form of a vague "intent to implement", would be so important for a nascent JPEG successor.

See comment on peer (TL;DR: I agree, and that's the substance of the post we're commenting on)

Your posts here seem of the “just asking questions” variety—no substance other than being counterculture. Do you have any proof or resemblance of any logical reason to think this?

It's a gentle joke, it happened, that's TFA. (ex. see the other threads re: it started from the JPEG XL repo).

I use asking questions as a way to keep contentious discussions on track without being boorish. And you're right, it can easily be smarmy instead of Socratic without tone, a la the classic internet sarcasm problem.

Gentle note: I only asked one question, and only in the post you replied to.

Whatever are you referring to? JPEG XL had already been merged into Chromium, prior to being removed again (without a proper reason ever given). As far as I know, the JPEG XL developers have offered to do whatever work was necessary for Chromium specifically, but were never taken up on the offer.

Same thing with Firefox, which has had basic support merged into Nightly, and a couple more patches gathering dust due to lack of involvement from the side of Firefox. Mozilla has since decided to take a neutral stance on JPEG XL, seemingly without doing any kind of proper evaluation. Many other programs (like GIMP, Krita, Safari, Affinity, darktable) already support JPEG XL.

People are not getting upset because projects don’t invest their resources into supporting JPEG XL. People are getting upset because Google (most notably), which has a decisive say in format interoperability, is flat out refusing to give JPEG XL a fair consideration. If they came up with a list of fair conditions JPEG XL has to meet to earn their support, people could work towards that goal, and if JPEG XL failed to meet them, people would easily come to terms with it. Instead, Google has chosen to apply double standards, present vague requirements, and refuse to elaborate. If anyone is ‘preventing even foundational elements of a successful effort’, it’s Google, or more specifically, the part that’s responsible for Chromium.

has had basic support merged

I read the parent post as saying that this is the problem, i.e. that "complete" support is a mess, because AFAIK even the reference implementation is incomplete and buggy, and that then getting angry at the consumers of it is besides the point and won't lead anywhere (which is what we see in practice).

Browsers supporting a format "a little" is almost worse than not supporting it at all, because it makes the compatibility and interoperability problems worse.

It also doesn't help that the Chrome team doesn't seem to apply the sam standard to other formats - webp, avif, brotli etc. were all rushed through while providing a much more questionable benefit and having only very limited support outside the web.

I don't think that is accurate. Brotli was added first to Firefox. It took 9 months longer for Chrome. Brotli has many other uses than content encoding in the web.

>"just figure out how to merge it in, and if you don't like it, that's malfeasance!"

It isn't not accepting it or hostile. That is completely not true.

They actively push against JPEG XL, despite all the data, prior to even 1.0 suggest it is or could be better than AVIF in many cases. To the point where they even make up false benchmarks to downplay JPEG XL.

Companies were even willing to paid ( wont name ) and put resources into getting JPEG XL because they see it to be so good. But they still refused.

It is at this point people thought something doggy is going on. And then not only did Google not explain themselves. They were even more hostile.

So why the extra hate? Well partly because this is a company who gave us an over promised WebP and underdelivered.

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