Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

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I'd argue the thread up through the comment you are replying to is fact-free gossiping - I'm wondering if it was an invitation to repeat the fact-free gossip, the comment doesn't read that way. Reads to me as more exasperated, so exasperated they're willing to speak publicly and establish facts.

My $0.02, since the gap here on perception of the situation fascinates me:

JPEG XL as a technical project was a real nightmare, I am not surprised at all to find Mozilla is waiting for a real decoder.

If you get _any_ FAANG engineer involved in this mess a beer || truth serum, they'll have 0 idea why this has so much mindshare, modulo it sounds like something familiar (JPEG) and people invented nonsense like "Chrome want[s] to kill it" while it has the attention of an absurd amount of engineers to get it into shipping shape.

(surprisingly, Firefox is not attributed this - they also do not support it yet, and they are not doing anything _other_ than awaiting Chrome's work for it!)

> JPEG XL as a technical project was a real nightmare

Why?

> (surprisingly, Firefox is not attributed this - they also do not support it yet, and they are not doing anything _other_ than awaiting Chrome's work for it!)

There is no waiting on Chrome involved in: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1986393

> (surprisingly, Firefox is not attributed this - they also do not support it yet, and they are not doing anything _other_ than awaiting Chrome's work for it!)

The fuck are you talking about? The jxl-rs library Firefox is waiting on is developed by mostly the exact same people who made libjxl which you say sucks so much.

In any case, JXL obviously has mindshare due to the features it has as a format, not the merits of the reference decoder.

> they'll have 0 idea why this has so much mindshare

Considering the amount of storage all of these companies are likely allocating to storing jpegs + the bandwidth of it all - maybe the instant file size wins?

Hard disk and bandwidth of jpegs are almost certainly negligible in the era of streaming video. The biggest selling point is probably client side latency from downloading the file.

We barely even have movement to webp &avif, if this was a critical issue i would expect a lot more movement on that front since it already exists. From what i understand avif gives better compression (except for lossless) and has better decoding speed than jxl anyways.

> We barely even have movement to webp &avif

If you look at CDNs, WebP and AVIF are very popular.

> From what i understand avif gives better compression (except for lossless) and has better decoding speed than jxl anyways.

AVIF is better at low to medium quality, and JXL is better at medium to high quality. JXL decoding speed is pretty much constant regardless of how you vary the quality parameter, but AVIF gets faster and faster to decode as you reduce the quality; it's only faster to decode than JXL for low quality images. And about half of all JPEG images on the web are high quality.

The Chrome team really dislikes the concept of high quality images on the web for some reason though, that's why they only push formats that are optimized for low quality. WebP beats JPEG at low quality, but is literally incapable of very high quality[1] and is worse than JPEG at high quality. AVIF is really good at low quality but fails to be much of an improvement at high quality. For high resolution in combination with high quality, AVIF even manages to be worse than JPEG.

[1] Except for the lossless mode which was developed by Jyrki at Google Zurich in response to Mozilla's demand that any new web image format should have good lossless support.

> AVIF is better at low to medium quality, and JXL is better at medium to high quality.

BTW, this is no longer true. With the introduction of tune IQ (Image Quality) to libaom and SVT-AV1, AVIF can be competitive with (and oftentimes beat) JXL at the medium to high quality range (up to SSIMULACRA2 85). AVIF is also better than JPEG independently of the quality parameter.

JXL is still better for lossless and very-high quality lossy though (SSIMULACRA2 >90).

>AVIF is better at low to medium quality,

>The Chrome team really dislikes the concept of high quality images on the web for some reason though, that's why they only push formats that are optimized for low quality.

It would be more accurate to say Bit per Pixel (BPP) rather than quality. And that is despite the Chrome team themselves showing 80%+ of images served online are in the medium BPP range or above where JPEG XL excel.

Isn't medium quality the thing to optimize for? If you are doing high quality you've already made the tradeoff that you care about quality more than latency, so the precieved benefit of mild latency improvement is going to be lower.

jxl let’s you further compress existing JPEG files without additional artifacting, which is significant given how many jpeg files already exist.

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