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I would argue that as of 2026, we have enough storage and bandwidth that lossless compression is justifiable in almost every use case.

Computers should not be making images look worse than they were captured. It's not 1996 anymore. We don't need to be doing this at all.

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Depends on your location. While I have a decent internet connection at home, the mobile one is trash. Good for IM and not much else.

Most of the people I know only have the mobile connection, pay a lot for the privilege, and while speeds are generally good (LTE and up), the monthly cap for almost all of them is 10-20 GB.

Just to put some numbers to this, I looked at an image I recently took with my phone:

Original image (JPEG): 3072×4080, 2.6 MB. Transcoded to JPEG XL: 2.1 MB.

To display at 2x density on my web page, it would be 1598×2122.

Lossless JPEG XL: 2.5 MB. Web-quality JPEG XL: 93 kB. Web-quality AVIF: 70 kB.

It still seems worth it.

A 2.5 MB download just isn't a problem in 2026. I would far rather see the lossless image than save a few MB.

If you're on a train, or a congested area, even 100 kB is a problem.

Try traveling abroad with a prepaid data SIM (or limited roaming data allowance).

Plenty of websites already have comically huge pointless images (often then scaled down to tiny sizes for display). No need to make the problem worse.

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